


Man in the Mirror

by fancylances



Series: Greatest Hits [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Found Family, M/M, Stephen Strange Unofficial Avengers Therapist, Stephen Strange teaches everyone magic apparently, mirror dimension shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-06-10 13:52:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 42,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15292926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fancylances/pseuds/fancylances
Summary: Stephen Strange must find a way to balance his time between his new relationship with Tony Stark and his new apprenticeship with Wanda Maximoff.





	1. date night

“Who are you trying to impress, Stephen?” 

Stephen turned to find Wong in his doorway. And, to be fair, he _had_ left the door open. To be even _more_ fair, Wong had been at the Kamar-Taj library an hour ago when Stephen had begun this series of trials and tribulations.

At least he had clothes on, Stephen thought with a shrug.

He mumbled an excuse, tugging on the ill-fitting sleeves of the blazer. It must have been ten years old, so far in the back of his closet that it had started to grow feral. It was brown, had fading elbow patches, and definitely didn’t match the shoes he’d scrounged up.

Wong leaned closer, just slightly, and pretended to be hard of hearing. “What did you say?”

“I have a date,” Stephen said more forcefully, and definitely a little too loudly. 

“Mister Stark taking his new ‘arm candy’ out for a night on the town?” Wong asked, and he flung the latest gaudy magazine at him. 

Stephen caught it deftly, grimacing even before he turned it over to see what the “press” had to say about him now.

“So now I’m _arm candy_ ,” Stephen read, staring at the newest snap of Tony and himself in a corner of the cover. “Last week I was _homewrecker_ , so I guess this is a step up. This one doesn’t say I have a face like a horse, at least,” he murmured, as he flicked through the tawdry pages. “People get _paid_ for this?”

“People get paid _a lot_ for this,” Wong replied.

“You should get a second job, Wong,” Stephen muttered, throwing a grin his way. He did a hard double take. “You’re not—”

“I would never insult our friendship by selling information to gossip magazines, Stephen,” Wong said, feigning offence. “And if I did, I would never say that you have a face like a horse.”

“I hope you bought something nice,” Stephen laughed, tossing the magazine back at Wong.

“Remember Thai takeout last week?”

Stephen shook his head, a little disgusted noise leaving his throat. “ _Now_ I’m insulted. Is that all an informant can afford?”

Wong crossed his arms, smirking. “Maybe a different tie?”

Stephen sighed, looking at himself in the full-length mirror. “I used to clean up a lot nicer on a surgeon’s budget.”

“If I can be so bold,” Wong cut in, “I don’t think Stark is going to care what you wear. Have you seen half of what he wears in public?”

Stephen chuckled, and decided against a tie altogether.

Minutes later, there was a loud knocking at the Sanctum’s front door, and Tony entered from the growing twilight outside.

“Taxi for Strange?” Tony called into the foyer, and his voice carried up the stairs. Stephen ran a hand back through his hair once more in the mirror before he left his room and practically jogged down the hall to the lobby.

Tony was leaning in a way he must have considered casual on the bannister at the foot of the stairs, and his head popped up when Stephen appeared. He grinned so easily, and Stephen found his mouth matching his. And he realized that the moment he thought he had spent looking at Tony was longer than just a moment when Wong cleared his throat from his chair by the door.

Stephen gathered himself, much to Tony’s amusement, and tried to brush it off.

“You didn’t actually get a cab, did you?” Stephen grimaced, coming down the stairs at a clip.

“Thought we’d walk,” Tony said, and he practically launched in to press a hard kiss on Stephen’s mouth. “Ready?”

Even after a month and a half, Tony still managed to take his breath away now and then. And, by the way Tony was smirking up at him, he knew _exactly_ what he was doing.

“Ah, yeah,” Stephen said, half-dazed as he looked down at himself. “I’m not going to embarrass you, am I?”

“Are you kidding?” Tony laughed, sliding a hand around Stephen’s waist to pull him in at the hip. “Have you seen half the shit I wear in public?”

Wong’s laughter followed them out the door.

Bleecker Street was still under construction, even into the evening. The aftermath of the battle with Thanos’ emissaries had torn the infrastructure of the Village up pretty nicely, and they’d been working almost around the clock to get everything back in working order. Considering how hectic the first week back had been, Stephen thought everything was going rather swimmingly. 

A group of five construction workers taking a break beside a pile of bricks stood across the street, and one of them looked up when Stephen and Tony left the Sanctum. She raised her hand and waved—in the few conversations Stephen had with the workers, he’d come to find out that she was the boss of the evening crew, and a _huge_ fan of the Avengers.

“See?” Stephen heard her say, nudging the man beside her. “I told you Iron Man hung out here!”

Tony chuckled, waving across the street to the gaggle of onlookers. A few flashes from phone cameras went off, and Tony held up two fingers to pose for them. He linked his arm through Stephen’s, and they headed off down the street together—dodging orange cones and yellow tape.

“You look good,” Tony said out of nowhere, leaning slightly into Stephen’s arm. “I mean, you always look good. But—don’t worry,” he fished out from his pauses. 

“So the next story they’ll put out will be about the thrift store wizard and his mismatched wardrobe,” Stephen sighed, but he leaned back against Tony’s arm.

He could feel Tony watching him, but neither of them said a word for another two blocks. Just held on to each other, arms inextricably linked.

They came to a stop in front of a restaurant Stephen had walked by several times since moving into the Sanctum, but he’d never quite worked up the nerve to look at the menu and the prices therein. His options for fine dining were a bit limited, now. Anywhere with a wine list was definitely out of the question. But arm-in-arm with Tony Stark, there were infinitely more culinary options before him.

Tony held the door open for him, and Stephen walked in to an empty restaurant.

“A little quiet for a Friday night,” Stephen mused with a smile, having already figured out what Tony had done.

“Well,” Tony said proudly, “I know how much you hate being followed by the vultures with cameras, so... I just rented the whole place for the night.”

A slow smirk worked its way onto Stephen’s face, beaming down at Tony. “How do you do it, Tony? Deal with the vultures, I mean.”

“Ignore it, mostly,” Tony admitted, waving as the maitre’d approached. “And when you can’t ignore it, just go with it. They’ll write something about you anyway, might as well give ‘em a show.”

There were a total of seven staff members on hand for the private Stark-Strange party. The maitre’d, their waiter, the sommelier (who had some very interesting suggestions for wine pairings that Stephen never would have dreamed of), and four kitchen staff who were all brought out and introduced before the meal began. Even when he’d had the kind of money a surgeon made, Stephen had never been given this kind of treatment—and when Tony saw the embarrassed flush of pink in Stephen’s ears, he waved them all off to do their duties.

They linked hands across the table over appetizers, and they loosened easily into conversation in the very personal candlelight.

Stephen’s eyes flicked up to the space over Tony’s shoulder, where a group of three kitchen staff and their waiter were gathered and talking excitedly amongst themselves—pointing at their table in a way that maybe they thought was surreptitious. A tired little smirk fought its way onto Stephen’s lips, and he rubbed wearily at his eyes.

“What’s up?” Tony asked, his fork halfway to his mouth before he noticed Stephen’s tired movements.

“We have another fan club,” Stephen said, and he gave the smallest nod to the gaggle of staff. “The waiter was taking pictures.”

Tony turned full-bodied in his chair, which brought a bout of embarrassed whispers from their observers, who tried to look very busy. When Tony turned back around, he let out a long sigh. 

He smiled, low and understanding. “Want me to buy his phone off him?” Tony asked. At Stephen’s quiet laugh, his shoulders settled. “Or… is this okay?”

Give them a show, right?

“It’s okay,” Stephen said, sighing to steel his nerves—in case this wasn’t as good an idea as he hoped.

Tony smirked, and he turned again and cupped a hand to his mouth to shout: “Hey! We look better from this angle, come on!”

They managed to fit nine at a table meant for two, with staggered chairs pulled up close enough to chat. Almost everyone had leaned in for a selfie with Tony, whose animated face pulled into something different for each one.

Surprisingly, Stephen thought as he sat and talked with the staff, more than a few of them were actually interested in talking to _him_. One young man in particular was holding down the job at the restaurant while he tried to put himself through med school, and shakingly managed to admit that his uncle had assisted on one of Stephen’s surgeries years ago. Stephen didn’t recall the name, but he smiled and nodded and said that he had—he’d managed to be a spectacular ass in the past, and didn’t want to ruin this boy’s night because of his previous ego.

Tony even got Stephen to pose for a picture with him, both of them flashing a peace sign.

“Send me that one,” Tony demanded, leaning over the waiter’s phone to see how it had turned out—completely missing the sappy smile on Stephen’s face.

+++

The walk back was silent but for the noises of the city around them as they strolled hand-in-hand back to the Sanctum. Stephen watched a police car streak by absently, and when he looked back Tony’s face was a swirl of complex emotion, his eyes fixed on his feet as they walked.

“Hey,” Stephen finally said, his voice low. “Is everything all right?”

A nervous little laugh bubbled out of Tony’s chest, and his fingers gripped Stephen’s just a little more tightly. Their movement ceased in the middle of the sidewalk, and another couple moved around them with a tutting noise. Tony tried to regain his cool nonchalance, but it came out of him in an uneasy sigh.

“I just—” Tony began, and he stopped himself to find better words, not meeting Stephen in the eye. “I really don’t wanna fuck this up.”

Stephen laughed, and perhaps that hadn’t been the right reaction, judging by the embarrassed movement of Tony’s eyes. So he rested a hand on either of Tony’s shoulders and squared them to face each other (another set of pedestrians scooting by their display and openly complaining about how much space they were taking up).

“Tones,” Stephen said softly (and a quiet little laugh accompanied the flush in Tony’s face). “You know I’m crazy about you.”

“Well, I don’t exactly have the best track record, do I?” Tony broke back in, and he brought his eyes up to find Stephen’s. He really _was_ nervous. Granted, he was probably nervous a lot more often than Stephen was aware of, but it nearly never _showed_.

“I don’t, either,” Stephen assured him. “I have a lot I’m not proud of, you know that.”

Tony’s hands rose from his side, lingered on Stephen’s hips, one of his thumbs running nervous circles there. He opened his mouth to say something when a passerby with his head down over his phone bumped into Tony’s shoulder without an apology and kept walking.

“Hey!” Tony called after him, still hanging onto Stephen’s waist with one hand. “We were having a moment!”

Tony’s verbal rampage was interrupted when Stephen pressed a firm kiss to Tony’s brow to wrangle him back into that moment. That kiss seemed to push out any of Tony’s misgivings, relaxed him in an instant with a long sigh.

“Back to my place?” Stephen asked with a smirk.

Tony laughed, moved in closer with one eyebrow raised mischievously. “Is it that kind of date?”

The moment was interrupted when Spider-Man landed on the pavement beside them—amidst little gasps and more camera flashes from across the street (a group of tourists; most of the people of the Village had seen Spider-Man up close enough to not be so enraptured by the spectacle). Both Stephen and Tony turned to look at him with nearly identical looks of concern and annoyance.

“I know you guys have phones,” Peter started in, folding his arms. The suit narrowed its eyes at them like some kind of disapproving parent.

Tony rolled his eyes, but didn’t move out of close proximity to Stephen. “Does this _look_ like a work outing? We’re on a _date_.”

Peter seemed to take it in, suddenly. And he faltered for a moment, but didn’t back down.

“Okay, I get that,” Peter protested. “But what if there was an emergency or something?”

“Then I guess someone would _swing by_ to interrupt us,” Tony sighed. “Obviously.”

“What’s wrong?” Stephen asked, narrowly avoiding calling the boy by name with so many bystanders.

“Captain Rogers said he was trying to call Mister Stark for like an hour. He didn’t sound like he was panicking, but I don’t think he’d try for an hour if it wasn’t important.”

A soul-crushing sigh left Tony’s lungs, and he planted his forehead into Stephen’s shoulder. “Of course,” he muttered into the old blazer.

Stephen held a hand on the back of Tony’s neck, shooting Peter a little grin. “It’s fine, Tony,” he said into the ear closest to his mouth. “I knew I’d have to share you with the Avengers when we started this.”

When Tony pulled away, Stephen could barely look at the sunshine in Tony’s eyes as he beamed up at him—he wondered if he would ever be used to Tony looking at him like he was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

“Okay,” Tony said, finally breaking away from Stephen’s grip, and pointed a single finger back at him. “But we’re picking this back up tomorrow. Or whenever they’re done with me.” 

Tony moved up, halfway to a kiss, before he halted awkwardly. Turned to Peter with a look of hard annoyance and made a signal with his finger for the boy to turn around.

Peter exaggerated the motion of rolling his eyes, but he turned to face the other way.

And Tony pressed upward against Stephen’s mouth and into a lingering kiss. Stephen hardly had time to register it, to kiss him back, before he’d pulled away again. Tony winked at him, and with two taps of the arc reactor, the Bleeding Edge armor formed around him in a handful of seconds.

“Let’s go, kiddo,” Iron Man said through the helmet of the suit. And he blasted off the sidewalk as Peter waved his goodbye to Stephen and shot a web to pull him off the ground to follow.

And Stephen was left alone, surrounded by people who had just watched Tony Stark kiss him. He sucked in a hard breath, acknowledged their presence with a nod, and took off in the direction of the Sanctum. Thankfully, no one followed him.

The lights were glowing softly when Stephen returned, and he wondered absently if Wong was still inside—knowing how well the man seemed to read Stephen, he was sure Wong knew that he’d intended to bring Tony back and had cleared out early for their sake. He chuckled to himself, shook his head, and opened the door to step inside.

Wanda Maximoff was waiting for him.

It was probably a good thing that Stephen’s first instinct on seeing someone unexpected in the Sanctum was to go immediately defensive. Stephen summoned a shield before the door had even closed behind him.

Wanda held up both of her hands, and though there was surprise on her face, there was no fear. She waved with one of her hands, just a little greeting, but it was enough to show that she posed no immediate threat.

“It’s nice to see you again, too, Doctor Strange,” she said, breathing out with a sad little smile.

Stephen lowered his shield, and it dissipated slowly.

“Sorry,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “I wasn’t expecting company.” Excluding the company of Tony Stark he’d been hoping for, that was. He waved a hand at the chairs situated near the entrance, and she moved to sit in one as instructed.

“You have a very nice… museum,” she said, gazing about at the artifacts.

“This is the New York Sanctum, protected by sorcerers for hundreds of years from metaphysical and extradimensional threats to this realm,” Stephen said as he took the seat across from her. “And you went through all the trouble of getting here from the Compound instead of getting my phone number from Rogers. What do you want Miss Maximoff?”

She smirked. “Right to the point.” 

Wanda held up a single finger, and produced an ephemeral red aura that swirled around her hand. Stephen sat up in his chair, spine stiff, but she shook her head.

“I don’t know if what Hydra did to me is even close to the things that you can do, Doctor Strange, but I _have_ seen what you can do.”

Stephen watched the energy dance around Wanda’s fingers, studied it for a moment. “Are you asking me to research your… _powers_?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I’m asking for your help,” Wanda said finally. “I want you to teach me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI AGAIN EVERYONE! I'm back with a sequel, and I don't have much to say yet except that I love stupid 80s music and I love these boys. Have fun!


	2. peace offering

Stephen blinked in confusion, and Wanda Maximoff’s face had dropped during that silence.

“Doctor Strange?” she finally asked, scooting to the edge of her chair.

“I heard you,” he cut in, narrowed his eyes and held up a hand to stop her questioning. “Look, Miss Maximoff—”

“Please just call me Wanda,” she murmured. “Miss Maximoff is certainly a mouthful.”

Stephen took a breath through his nose and started again. “Wanda, I don’t know what gave you the idea that I’m a teacher. My only duties are to protect this Sanctum and the reality of this world as a whole.”

“If that’s all,” Wanda said with a little unsure smile.

The edge of Stephen’s mouth ticked up. So, she could be funny. In the few times he’d been in the same room as Wanda Maximoff, she had been very quiet. Reserved, distantly sad. She’d rarely raised her voice to speak, and when she had, it was unsure—like a dog afraid to be kicked. 

He knew from the reports on Sokovia and the incident in Lagos several years ago that her abilities were volatile, but extremely powerful. She could be very dangerous, if she couldn’t keep her powers in check; but she had so far, for the most part. She had sided with Captain Rogers in the falling-out of the Avengers, been held and escaped from the Raft, and had been working as a rogue power until Thanos had stepped in a month and a half ago. 

The tenuous deal the Avengers seemed to have struck with Secretary Ross was something Stephen hadn’t been privy to, as an outside party, but Wanda hadn’t been ejected from the country, and she hadn’t been thrown back in jail. She was sitting in his foyer, looking expectantly at him with large, curious eyes.

“I’m not in the habit of taking apprentices,” Stephen said plainly.

“You taught Stark,” she reminded him, folding her hands in her lap patiently. Her little smirk returned. “I’ve seen him practicing when he thinks no one is watching.”

Stephen laughed at the image she’d put in his head (Tony stumbling over spells in his office, the Avengers just out of his sight and laughing), just something small, but it seemed to ease the tension held in both of their shoulders.

“That was a special circumstance,” Stephen added.

“Was that special circumstance that you wanted to sleep with him?” she bandied.

The smile dropped like a stone off of Stephen’s mouth, and an indignant rush of blood took its place. Wanda’s face paled, and she held up both of her hands in defense.

“That was… supposed to be a joke,” she said quite quickly. “I’m sorry, it came off insensitive.”

“Yes, it did,” Stephen managed around the blush. “And I don’t appreciate you cornering in my Sanctum.”

“Please,” she cut back in. There was a soft desperation in her voice, and she choked it back down. “Please, just… _consider_ it. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt anymore because of me. I’m sure you can understand that.”

Stephen took a breath, and he slowly nodded. “I do.” But he stood and gestured to the door. “Thank you for coming, Wanda, but it’s getting late.”

She stood to match him, her fingers clasped tightly together before her.

“I’m sorry for bothering you. Have a nice night, doctor.”

After she’d gone, Stephen palmed his face and groaned into his hand. This just wasn’t his night.

+++

Wong set a box of donuts down on the table in front of Stephen, causing the latter to look up sharply from the newspaper.

“A peace offering,” Wong offered, smiling.

“I don’t want anything bought with your blood money,” Stephen chuckled, a smirk left hanging on his face as he took a powdered donut out of the box.

“Did Stark already leave?” Wong asked, taking a look around for him. “He usually stays for breakfast.”

Stephen cleared his throat awkwardly, not looking up from the paper. “He, ah, didn’t stay over last night.”

Wong was suddenly on high alert. “Is everything all right?”

And Stephen laughed. “Are you suddenly concerned about the state of my relationship?”

Wong tried to look casual, took a donut for himself. “When it affects your ability to protect this Sanctum—”

“You’re a bad liar, Wong,” Stephen said, and polished off his breakfast. “He and Peter were needed at the Compound last night, apparently. I had a different visitor.” At Wong’s nonverbal prodding, Stephen continued. “Wanda Maximoff came to see me.”

“Maximoff?” Wong asked, and he finally took a seat across from Stephen. “What on earth would she want with you?”

“She wanted me to teach her, like I taught Tony.” Stephen shook his head. “I have no idea what she can do—some of it _does_ look like sorcery, but for the most part it’s completely unlike anything I’ve ever dealt with.”

Wong was looking at him expectantly, crossed arms to complete the look of a mother hen. “And?”

“And?” Stephen repeated, confusion scrunching the features on his face.

“When is her first lesson?”

Stephen’s abrupt laughter caught them both off guard, and he found it cut off just as quickly as it began. “Wong, I’m not a _teacher_. The Masters at Kamar-Taj—”

“The Masters at Kamar-Taj don’t know the Avengers like you do,” Wong supplied. “You had unprecedented success with Stark. He produced a shield with _hours_ of your instruction. Imagine what you could do with another pupil.”

“I have other duties—”

“And I’m the librarian, yet here I am.” Wong spread his arms wide. “I believe you have an opportunity, Stephen.”

“To embarrass myself in front of the Avengers?”

“To become a part of them.”

A heady quiet filled the room, and Wong nodded at Stephen’s prolonged silence.

“What do you have to lose by giving her a chance?” Wong asked.

“Besides my time, dignity, and a few fingers?” Stephen sighed, knowing that he was going to lose this battle.

“Our purpose as sorcerers,” Wong said, taking another donut from the box, “is to protect this world, but also to _enrich _it. If there _is_ something in Maximoff’s powers that resembles sorcery, isn’t it our duty to make sure that it’s used responsibly? To help her?”__

__Stephen tapped his fingers on the wood of the table, thinking quickly for just one long moment. He found himself smirking at Wong—how had this man become his conscience? Stephen stood, and gave Wong a succinct nod as he, too, took a second donut from the box._ _

__“Then I’m going to need you to do some research.”_ _

____

+++

Stephen stepped through the portal from the foyer of the Sanctum and into the lobby of the Avengers Compound. He’d left the cloak (antsy, probably chomping at the bit to see Tony again) at the Sanctum in hopes it would make the many meetings he knew might take place just that much easier. The echoes of noise indicated that there was someone nearby that might be able to lead him to Wanda Maximoff.

Clint Barton rounded the nearest corner, and he looked up as though he’d known Stephen was standing there without even having seen him.

“Hey, Doctor Arm Candy,” Barton said, grinning ear to ear.

He’d met Barton at Tony’s official we-saved-the-universe party more than a month ago, after they’d negotiated the fallout of Thanos’ destruction and the sudden disappearance and then reappearance of half the Earth’s population. Barton appeared to be made out of pure sass, and Stephen honestly wondered if he’d ever taken anything seriously in his life. 

Stephen was able to keep the embarrassed flush from coalescing on his face. “I thought you retired, Barton. Again.”

Barton shrugged. “I dabble.” He chucked a thumb over his shoulder in some indeterminate direction. “Looking for Tony?”

Stephen opened his mouth to answer, when another Avenger burst into view.

“Hey!” the other man said loudly—about Barton’s age, someone that Stephen didn’t recognize—coming up alongside Barton with a towel around his shoulders like he’d come from a shower or a work-out. “Who’s this guy?”

“Doctor Stephen Strange,” Stephen offered, eyes shifting from Barton to the newcomer.

“Scott Lang, er, Ant-Man I guess—” He held out a hand, grinning boyishly. Stephen shook the proffered hand, found the grip surprisingly firm. “I don’t remember you being at the big airport shindig, are you new?”

“I don’t remember seeing _you_ at the end of the world,” Stephen found himself snarking before he could reign himself back.

Thankfully, Lang just laughed. “Ouch. Okay, touche, I guess.” He crossed his arms and sized Stephen up in a glance. “So, I can shrink and get real big; what d’you do?”

“Tony Stark, mostly,” Barton said through a grin.

“Wow, really? Stark?” Lang asked with a light shrug, seemingly completely ignorant of the way Stephen’s face had gone completely pale. “Not my type, but I guess I can see it.”

“I’m a Master of the Mystic Arts,” Stephen cut in firmly (Barton shying from the utterly acidic glare Stephen threw his way between words). “I suppose you could call it magic.”

“Oh yeah?” Lang’s eyes lit up. “I guess you could say I’m something of a magic man myself.” 

Showing that he had nothing up his sleeves, Lang made a swift move to pull the ten of diamonds from behind Barton’s ear with a flourish. Barton broke into welcome laugher, and even Stephen let a single chuckle leave his lungs.

“Do you always have those on you?” Barton asked, batting Lang’s hand away.

“What, you don’t?” Lang volleyed.

As they turned to leave, Barton leaned in closer to Stephen—his normally smirking face turned into something more serious for once. “Hey, sorry about—well, you gotta haze the new guy a little, right?”

And he returned to Lang’s side, elbowed him a little as they strolled away. Lang turned to wave over his shoulder and say: “Nice to meet you, Doctor Strange! See you around!”

“Doctor Strange?” came another voice altogether, catching the end of Lang’s words and latching on, and Stephen turned to it in a bit of a daze. Rhodes approached from the corridor to his left, the attachments on his legs whirring as he moved to intercept. “Hey, what’s the occasion? Looking for Tony?”

Rhodes was a bit of a mystery, to be honest. For all intents and purposes, he should have despised Stephen. The sorcerer was primarily the reason for breaking up the Stark-Potts wedding, and Stephen had seen how close Pepper and Rhodes were in the few times he’d been near enough to observe the two of them together. In sharp contrast, Rhodes barely knew Stephen outside of the battle on Titan, but he’d always smiled and shook his hand when they met, was always kind (or at least non-confrontational).

“Actually,” Stephen found himself saying, blinking as if he’d walked out into the harsh sun.

“I’ll see if Nat’s seen him,” Rhodes said before Stephen could explain himself, and he was off surprisingly quick up the accessible ramp to the third floor.

Stephen pinched the bridge of his nose, forced his mind to focus, and took a long breath. Five seconds later, he reopened his eyes and went searching on his own. Hopefully with fewer Avengers pinging into his orbit to distract him.

Tony was in the lab, sitting on one of the desks with a holographic display hovering inches from his raised fingertips. He shot one of the displays across the lab to where Doctor Banner was working on an open panel of machinery—wires spilling out around him like an animal’s innards.

As much as Stephen knew about human anatomy and the mystic arts, he never claimed to know the slightest about mechanics or robotics. He knew enough to know that Tony was more of a genius than he gave himself credit for (and he gave himself _a lot_ of credit), and enough to know when he knew absolutely nothing in comparison.

“Stephen!” he heard Tony’s voice from the other side of the glass to bring him out of his reverie. Tony’s head popped up over the glowing display in front of him, grinning almost too wide for his face. He shoved the interface aside, jumbling it in the air, and hopped down off the desk to sweep Stephen up in a grand, eager embrace.

“Hi, Tony,” Stephen managed to smirk around the kisses Tony peppered his face with. “This was the emergency?” he asked, smirking down at Tony.

“Baby, I’ve had one _hell_ of a night,” Tony murmured as he looped his arms around Stephen’s neck. “Steve brought me all the way out here to be Bruce’s little assistant—something boring and time-consuming about partially compromised systems and misaligned nodes.”

At the mention of the other man in the room, Stephen looked up to where Banner was dutifully ignoring their very public display of affection and gave a little wave.

“Hey, Stephen,” Banner said, an unsure smile hovering somewhere on his mouth coupled with an awkward wave. “Sorry, I tried to tell Cap it wasn’t an emergency.”

“You know old folks and technology,” Tony muttered, his eyes practically shining. “ _God_ , it’s good to see you. Is this clingy? Am I clinging?”

“It’s good to see you, too,” Stephen began, and the look on Tony’s face fell just a notch at the implied ‘but’ hanging in the air between them. “But I’m looking for Wanda.”

“ _Wanda_ ,” Tony said, confused and flat. Let it sit there like a rock in the hot sun, radiating. “Huh.”

“She came to the Sanctum last night—” Stephen realized that it sounded more awkward than it was, and he attempted to correct the growing look of concern in Tony’s eyes. “She asked me to teach her. Like I taught you.”

Tony blinked hard and long. The silence, though not yet uncomfortable, was going on for quite some time. Stephen opened his mouth, but Tony stopped him with a single finger held to Stephen’s lips.

“Hold on, I’m trying to think of a ‘you’re a wizard, Wanda’ joke I can use here,” Tony murmured. 

A smile bent onto Stephen’s mouth, and Tony mirrored him (though slowly).

“Really?” was all Tony had to ask.

“I know that I’m a latecomer to all this Avengers business,” Stephen started, and he brushed his fingers fondly through Tony’s hair. “But if I can help… then I should.”

“Okay,” Tony breathed, and he finally stepped out of Stephen’s space. “She’s been hiding in her room, lately. I don’t blame her. Things are still… weird around here.” He beckoned Stephen to follow him with one crook of his finger, and turned on the spot toward the stairs. Stephen gave a final farewell to Banner, and he followed.

Tony stepped aside when they reached the ordinary wooden door just like the others that dotted the long hallway, gesturing for Stephen to step up and take initiative. So the sorcerer approached the door and rapped his knuckles there—not too loudly, not too urgent.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Clint,” Wanda’s muffled voice came through the door.

“Wanda, it’s Doctor Strange,” Stephen said, and before he’d even finished his sentence, the door snapped open under his hand. 

Her hand was raised, and the red aura of energy she’d used to pull the door open dissipated in the air around her. She was perched on the foot of her bed, and she wasn’t crying—though her eyes were puffy enough to indicate that she had been not too long ago. She leaned just slightly forward, her face mostly taken up by her wide, hopeful eyes.

“Hi, Wanda,” Tony said somewhere over Stephen’s shoulder. 

Stephen retrieved the hand he’d left hovering in the air, and he nodded once at the young woman. “Can I come in?” he asked.

Wanda nodded, and she stood away from her bed. “Yes. Thank you for asking.” Her hands tied themselves in nervous knots in front of her.

Stephen crossed over the threshold to Wanda’s room—unassuming for someone as powerful as she was; the only decorations that stood out to him were two pictures side by side on her dresser: Wanda and her brother, and Wanda and Vision.

“I’m sorry for sending you away so quickly last night,” he began, but she shook her head, losing her face in her hair as she ducked her eyes away from his.

“No, you had every right. I _did_ corner you.” She tried a sad smile. “I didn’t ask to come in.”

Stephen’s shoulders settled. “I’m not a teacher. And you were right, we don’t know if your powers are related to any spells or sorcery that I know. But if there’s something I can do to help you, I will.”

He held out a hand between them.

For just a split second, there was a sting of worry clear in her eyes. But it was washed away completely by a smile that seized nearly her entire face. She took his hand in both of hers, shaking with muted but clear enthusiasm.

“Thank you, doctor,” she said through her still-growing smile.

“If I’m going to call you Wanda,” Stephen added, the hint of a smirk playing at his own lips, “you should probably call me Stephen.”

Her grin softened, and she dropped her hands back to her side. “ _Thank you_ , Stephen.”

And they both missed the confused, possessive look settling on Tony’s face as he stood in the doorway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there are so many Avengers... I am writing so many Avengers...


	3. training day

Two days later—a Monday—Stephen (the look completed with the cloak this time) reappeared at the Compound in the middle of breakfast, just outside the kitchen and with an armful of books stacked to and held under his chin. He startled Sam Wilson enough that his entire bowl of cereal hit the floor. Romanoff wasn’t spooked in the slightest. She took a smug bite of her apple, chuckled at Wilson’s reaction, and locked jovial eyes with Barton, who was perched on the counter beside her.

“Sorry,” Stephen muttered, and he waved his free hand to keep the books levitating in midair as to help Wilson clean the mess he’d helped make. “Maybe I should let you know I’m coming, in the future.”

“What, with a raven, or something?” Barton laughed.

“A text message, maybe?” Stephen grumbled, leveling a thin glare across the kitchen. “Is Rogers here? I need to speak to him.”

Romanoff left Barton’s side, leaving her unfinished apple with him—Barton shrugged and took a bite. “What’s up?” she asked.

“I need a safe space to train Wanda,” Stephen said, and before Wilson could even lean down to pick up his spoon, the reconstructed cereal bowl and all its contents were back on the table in front of him. He stared at it, opened his mouth to question it, but instead just shook his head and continued eating his breakfast.

“Wait, train Wanda?” Barton asked suddenly. His head shot up, and the playfulness had drained out of him to reveal a mixture of concern and apprehension. “Since when is this a thing?”

“Since today,” Stephen said, and with a gesture, the books floated gently in a train after him as he followed Romanoff, who had beckoned him down an adjacent hallway. 

Barton hopped down, following the both of them. “Wait, she’s not a wizard like you,” he pointed out, pulling up beside Stephen with his eyebrows drawn down. Angry? “Did Tony tell you to do this? Is he still—”

“ _She_ asked me,” Stephen pointed out, staring down his nose at Barton. “Don’t you have your own children to worry about?”

For once since Stephen had known him, Barton was speechless. 

“You can be kind of a shit, you know that?” Barton finally broke into a tight laugh. “Maybe that’s why he likes you.”

Stephen slid a sideways glance at his tagalong. And he realized that Barton wasn’t making fun of him. He wasn’t giving him a hard time. This was Barton’s way of being friendly. He was laughing _with_ him. And he was hanging on the end of his sentence, a childish smirk taking up half of his face and waiting for Stephen’s reaction.

So Stephen laughed, just a little mirthful chuckle, and looked away. Clint thumped his fist into Stephen’s shoulder and peeled away from their procession, disappearing into one of the many hallways.

Romanoff didn’t lead him to Rogers. She led him outside, to a walled courtyard with limited green space and sparse outdoor furniture.

“Is this all right?” Romanoff asked, gesturing widely.

Stephen inspected the space with a sweep of his eyes. Nothing expensive to destroy, by the looks of it, and plenty of room for maneuverability. A patio overlooking the courtyard from three stories up, and myriad windows glancing inward, but isolate otherwise. He turned back to Romanoff, who appeared to be interested in something in the sky.

“Is it?” he prompted.

She gave a noncommittal shrug. “Just because he’s got Captain in the name doesn’t mean we need his permission for everything. I’m sure we’ll find out if someone has an issue.”

“You’d rather take forgiveness?” Stephen asked, waving the books to lay in a pile on the only table in the courtyard.

Romanoff smiled, an actual genuine smile. “Every time.” She gave him a little wave, turning to re-enter the building. “I’ll get Wanda, don’t go anywhere.”

But Stephen didn’t linger for long once she’d left him. He conjured up a quick portal, and stepped through it into Tony’s office.

The man himself was faced away from Stephen. He had his feet propped up on his desk, his phone on speaker and the call on hold—the chintzy music was tinny and uncomfortably catchy, and Tony’s toes tapped absently in the air to the beat.

Stephen knew better than to sneak up on him. He announced himself in low tones, smirking at the back of Tony’s head.

“Morning, Tony.”

Tony spun in his chair, nearly turned too far, his face lit up like Christmas.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Tony answered, gazing upward with a sappy smile. He stood, almost comically fast, and rushed into Stephen’s waiting arms.

Sometimes, when he kissed Tony, Stephen felt like time slowed down just for them. Other times, it felt like days skipped by around them. This was one of the latter, as it was only when he heard Romanoff clear her throat behind them that he’d realized any time had passed at all.

Stephen blinked somewhat confusedly, staring at the equally dazed face of Tony in front of him. He’d somehow managed to shift Tony to sit on the desk, himself planted firmly between Tony’s knees—one of those legs wrapped around Stephen’s hip, hugging him just that much closer. And Tony had the hazy face of someone so thoroughly kissed that he barely remembered his own name. Stephen grinned, left another kiss on Tony’s cheek before he turned to their distraction.

“I thought I said don’t go anywhere,” Romanoff remarked, though smirking as she leaned in the doorway.

Stephen shrugged. “Am I forgiven?”

And she actually laughed, even if it was something short and small. “Come on, she’s waiting for her teacher.”

“Right behind you,” Stephen noted, and Romanoff gave him a knowing look—as if to say _don’t get distracted again_ —before she turned and left them alone.

“Oh,” Tony said, coming down from the high Stephen had given him. “First lesson today, right?”

Stephen nodded, pressed his mouth to Tony’s brow. “I could use your help,” he murmured, smoothing Tony’s hair away from his forehead.

“What?” Tony cracked, his eyebrows buckling with amusement. “Seriously? Like a sexy magician’s assistant? ‘Cause I don’t think I’m dressed for—”

Stephen held a finger to Tony’s mouth—sometimes a physical barrier was literally the only way to keep him from rambling. A smile quirked up on Tony’s stopped lips instead.

“I love you, Tony,” Stephen said in their closeness, and something went soft in Tony’s eyes. “I’m not going to hide anything from you, or exclude you, if I can help it. You’re part of my life, now; you need to know that.”

“Okay,” Tony said through something hard in his throat, which he cleared away and smiled through. “Yeah, okay.”

They both stepped through the portal and back out into the courtyard, where they found that they’d managed to beat Romanoff back down the stairs, and that Wanda was waiting for them there.

She’d dressed for a workout, and had tied her hair back and out of her face in a loose ponytail. She was even barefoot, and tapping her toes as she waited patiently. 

Wanda turned at the noise of their footfalls, and there was a nervous excitement in her that practically vibrated the air around her. Her eyes trailed between Stephen and Tony just once, and then she nodded.

“Good morning, Stephen,” she said. “Stark.”

“Morning,” Stephen echoed. He made a move with both of his hands, and what sparse decoration populate the courtyard pressed outward to hug the walls. Wanda smirked. “I told you before that I’m not really a teacher. That’s mostly true, but I _do_ have one pupil. Through the need to control the stones of the Infinity Gauntlet, Tony thought I was the only person on Earth qualified enough to teach him. Flattering,” he said with a little smirk, “but maybe not untrue.”

He glanced at Tony, and was surprised to find him on the defensive. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest, and his posture leaned away from the center, eyes downcast. 

Stephen chucked Tony’s chin up, made him look up at him, smiling kindly. “Show us what you can do, Tones.”

That was, apparently, all Tony needed to get his confidence back. He smirked up into Stephen’s adoring face, and with a few sharp gestures, he’d summoned a pair of glowing blue shields. 

“Kid’s stuff,” Tony mused, tossing one of the shields in his hand as if prepared to juggle it—and Stephen wondered if he was going to; it seemed like the kind of thing Tony would do to try and impress him.

“This is one of the simpler spells,” Stephen said, clasping his hands behind his back and circling his two students. “Defense is more than a last resort, it can be one of your greatest strengths. And—” he prompted, and without needing to be told, Tony saucered one of the shields across the length of the courtyard, where it pinged off a wall and up into the blue, “—sometimes defence can literally be the best offense.”

A full smile had taken Wanda’s face as she watched the display. 

By the time Stephen had noticed that they had an audience, there was already a group of three of them gathered. Romanoff had finally arrived, leaning on the wall by the door back inside. She’d brought Wilson and Clint with her—Wilson sitting forward in his chair and watching with interest, and Clint straddling his seat backwards and grinning like a child watching a magic show.

Stephen opened his mouth to ask them, politely, to leave. How was he supposed to teach when they were being watched and scrutinized?

“Hey,” he heard Tony say, coming up beside him with a hand on his shoulder. “Are these yokels paying for the show? Scram!”

“Come on,” Clint cut in, waving an arm at the courtyard as a whole. “Not every day we get entertainment like this. You don’t mind, do you, kiddo?” he asked Wanda.

She crossed her arms, looking at the three newcomers. Stephen knew from reading the reports that all of the assembled onlookers had sided with Rogers—aside from Romanoff, and _she_ had eventually turned coat as well. He slid his eyes to Tony, watched him for any change in his demeanor.

There was something hidden in Tony’s eyes. He’d said that things still weren’t back to whatever “normal” had used to mean. Maybe it was even worse than Tony was telling him. And Tony looked up when he felt Stephen’s eyes on him, and that look melted into something just that much more vulnerable—something Stephen was sure that only _he_ had been allowed to see.

“I mind,” Wanda said clearly. And Stephen turned to find her watching _them_. She gave the smallest nod.

Clint looked taken aback, and he sat fully up and out of his slouching stance. “Oh. Yeah, okay, then. See you after?”

Wanda gave a nonverbal affirmation, and waited until all three of them had departed before she dropped her arms back to her side with a tight exhale.

Tony cleared his throat. “Thanks.”

Wanda’s stance shifted. “Things are different, now,” she said quietly. “The airport was a long time ago. So many terrible things have happened since then, and I haven’t had the chance—” She hugged her arms around herself, as if suddenly cold. “I was in the soul stone, too. You saved my life, and I never thanked you for it.” She swallowed, visibly upset. “I’m sorry, Tony.”

He blinked oddly at her, and his back straightened like a huge weight had been taken off of his shoulders. “Yeah. I’m sorry, too.”

Stephen sighed, something pleasant. The tension wasn’t completely gone from the air of the courtyard, but some of it had dissipated—yes, there were still clouds in the sky, but none that blocked the sun.

“Back to the lesson?” he asked once an adequate amount of silence had passed. 

Wanda straightened up, nodded.

In nearly synchronized movements, Stephen and Tony produced their shields again. 

Stephen’s fingers trembled just slightly, gripping tight to hold the shield in place. “Spells are structured,” he said, and he manipulated the shield to pull it back until it encircled his entire arm, “but malleable at the same time. I taught Tony the gestures to conjure a shield, but I’ve never seen any other sorcerer use them the way that he has. Structured, but malleable.”

“It’s all so…” Wanda began, her eyes on the slowly spinning mandalas on Stephen’s arm. “I feel like I could do anything with my power, but that it owns me more than I do it.” She flexed her fingers, the red aura of energy dancing delicately across her knuckles. “I could use some structure.”

“Show me,” Stephen said firmly, nodding at her. Her smile faded just an inch, and she took one hesitant step away from him. “Don’t worry, these shields stood up to Thanos. I’m not afraid of you.”

The words seemed to strike her somewhere deep, but not in pain. It washed her of all tension, of all apprehension, and he finally saw her stand tall.

Wanda’s face twisted up into a grin, and there was a sudden wave of energy out of both of her hands. When she sent a blast of it in his direction, Stephen threw up his shield and curved it easily away. And Wanda drove in again, slicing through the air—to come face to face with the orange runes of Stephen’s mandala, her power surging against his. Her shoulders shook with barely-contained mirth, just as Stephen made a quick gesture to blast them away from one another.

He didn’t see the way the smile had dropped off of Tony’s face, his own shields fading away.

The cloak swirled around Stephen, pulled him a step backwards and out of the way of Wanda’s next attack. Her face broke instantly into confusion, fixing on the cloak for the first time as anything other than gaudy outerwear.

Stephen used the distraction to launch upward into the air and conjure his sabre.

And Wanda actually laughed, looking up at him. “You do magic _and_ fly?”

“I thought you were showing me what _you_ can do, Wanda,” Stephen barked down at her, testing his sabre with a swing. 

A proud little look came into her eyes, and she launched upward at him, energy streaming from her hands almost like the repulsors in Tony’s armor. She swiped a shield of her own making—a crude wall of energy, pulsing and red—to block the swipe from Stephen’s sabre and swept by him through the air. 

Wanda landed easily on the patio of the third floor that overlooked the courtyard. Windmilled her hands to gather her energy and blast it at Stephen, who held his shield firm against the onslaught. It drove him back, forced him through the air until his boots touched the wall opposite. He bent at the knees, took the brunt of the attack standing almost completely sideways on the wall.

Just like Tony had done months ago in the artifact room of his Sanctum, Stephen crossed his arms behind his shield and blasted it away from him by throwing his hands back out in front of him. The red energy blew apart around him like dust, just in time for Stephen to launch off the wall at Wanda across from him.

She threw up another wall in front of her, gritting her teeth as Stephen’s sabre slammed into it. And that turned into a grin that he could see even through the barrier of tangible red energy.

“What the _hell_?” Rhodes yelped from the door to the patio, scrambling away from the fight.

“We’re just training, Rhodey!” Wanda tried to say, only to find herself fighting back the press of Stephen’s advance—the sabre glancing off of her impromptu shield with a shower of sparks between them.

So she repaid the favor. Threw him back with a hard blast of energy from her fingertips. A red wave hit him hard in the chest, blew the air out of his lungs, and threw him backward—his back hit the handrail at the edge of the patio, and the power off of Wanda’s hands threw him over it.

He heard her gasp as he was cartwheeled off the patio, coupled with the rush of air past his ears as he fell a good three stories.

The cloak stopped him inches from the ground, close enough to see the flecks of rock in the concrete. His breath heaved in his chest, staring at the fall that could have killed him.

“Stephen!” he heard Wanda’s voice, saw the flash of red light as she guided herself back to the ground near him.

At the same time, in nearly the same cadence, Tony called out: “Stephen!” and came to his side. Righted him from the position parallel to the ground the cloak had suspended him in. Hugged Stephen close to his side, inspecting his face in their closeness.

And Stephen saw so many things in those brown eyes. Concern, first and foremost, followed by a softness that Tony rarely showed anyone. Adoration mixed with fury, a terrible mix. Stephen smiled at him, something he hoped was comforting.

“I’m fine,” he told both of them, and the cloak shook itself out around him to show that it was, too. He breathed hard through his mouth. “I think that’s enough for today, Wanda.”

“I’m sorry—” she started in, her hands held out in front of her in surrender.

Stephen shook his head, smirking to ease the fear he saw rising in her eyes. “I’ve had worse. Trust me.” He took his time, catching his breath and glancing between his two students. One horribly overprotective, the other terribly over-apologetic. “It’s all right. I’ll see you on Wednesday, Wanda.”

She swallowed any more words that she had prepared on her tongue, and twisted her fingers worriedly together in front of her. “All right,” she said tightly, her eyes wet and worried. “Wednesday. Thank you, Stephen.” And she brushed brusquely by the both of them and through the door into the Compound.

There was just one moment of silence. One moment, with Tony clutching Stephen close to his side and trying to catch his breath. A single moment where they didn’t say a word or make a move.

And then Tony grabbed Stephen by the hand, and he was suddenly pulling him. For just a moment, the cloak resisted—but with a look from Stephen, the animate piece of clothing flapped off of his shoulders and hovered in the courtyard by the unread books he’d brought.

Stephen let himself be pulled along. Tony’s fingers linked very firmly with his own, going at a strong march through halls and up a staircase—silent, insistent, but not angry. There was something else, something that Stephen could feel even through Tony’s fingers. Almost as if Tony was buzzing with trapped energy.

They were to Tony’s room before Stephen could finish his thought. Tony closed and locked the door behind them in one single, fluid movement.

“I—” Stephen tried to say, but found himself cut off when Tony grabbed Stephen by the collar of his robes, pinned him to the wall, and stood on his toes to mash them into a searing kiss. 

Stephen barely had time to register that his knees were giving out on him before Tony broke the kiss just as quickly and pulled him back away from the wall. Steered him effortlessly to the bed and dropped him there.

Stephen flopped back into the sheets with a short _oof_ , shock still surging through his limbs. And Tony was back on him, leaning over him, pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses to Stephen’s neck.

“Why do you have so many fucking layers on?” Tony grumbled against his skin, trying to force his way into Stephen’s robes.

Stephen swallowed past the rush of adrenaline, tried to undo the ties on the front of his robe, only to find Tony’s fingers wrapped firmly around his wrist. Pinned Stephen’s arm flat back onto the bed, pinned him even harder with his eyes.

This was new.

A thin, hopeless little moan and a nod were all Stephen could manage before Tony crushed their mouths together—insistent, needy, possessive. Tony straddled him, pressed him hard into the sheets. Impatient fingers ripping off belts, sifting through the layers of Stephen’s clothing until he found bare skin. Mapped out Stephen’s chest with his mouth—his tongue, his teeth—surging his hips into him.

“Tony—” Stephen gasped. And Tony pressed a single finger to Stephen’s lips, then fixed their mouths together to swallow any other noise Stephen tried to make.

As Tony wrenched his own shirt over his head, tossed it indiscriminately aside and started kicking his way out of his pants, Stephen wondered dizzily just how soundproof the rooms at the Compound were.

+++

Breathing hard, open-mouthed and almost too deeply, Stephen tried to find his voice. He swallowed, blinked, and looked back up into Tony’s eyes—those eyes that had pinned him just as hard as his hands had, now close and soft.

Stephen vocalized something that he’d meant to be words, and Tony’s face finally broke into a sappy grin. Stephen’s chest rumbled with silent laughter.

“You okay?” Tony asked, pressing a long kiss to Stephen’s damp forehead.

“Oh, absolutely,” Stephen murmured. “It’s only—” He opened his mouth, found it unresponsive again for a long moment he spent lost in Tony’s eyes. He took his time there, didn’t care that he was stuck; loved every second of exploring that face. And Tony knew it, from the slick little smile growing on his lips.

“What happened?” Stephen finally managed.

Tony ran a hand over his own face, hiding behind it as he fell into loose laughter. “That bad?”

“No,” Stephen said quickly—thought about trying to trap Tony’s hand in his own but found his muscles absolutely unresponsive. “No, it’s just that you’re not usually so… so…”

“What, _eager_?” Tony chuckled.

“ _On top_ ,” Stephen finished for him, and then he tripped over a bout of tight laughter. And Tony joined him, buckling until his face pressed into the space under Stephen’s chin. 

They just lay there, Tony flopped inelegantly across Stephen, tucked into him and just holding each other. Staring at the ceiling of Tony’s bedroom, sheets and pillows scattered haphazard in their haste, the lazy spinning of the overhead fan, Tony breathing in his ear. He wanted to memorize all of it, store it somewhere safe. Everything about this, about Tony—the slickness of his skin, the way his hair stuck up when he rifled his hand through it, how their bodies fit together, the lines at the corners of his mouth when he laughed.

“I love you,” Stephen murmured into Tony’s hair, planting a long kiss there and holding him tightly.

“You’re _so_ stuck with me,” he heard Tony’s voice, felt it against his chest. 

There was a brief flash of something that turned in Stephen’s stomach, just enough to worry him. He pressed another hard kiss to the top of Tony’s head, gripped his shaking fingers into the flesh of Tony’s shoulder, his back. 

Tony must have felt that little apprehension in him, somehow, and he lifted up on one elbow to look down at Stephen. “Hey,” he said softly. “Are you actually okay, baby?”

Stephen smiled, forced the odd feeling out of his stomach, and ignored it. “I’m fine.” He ran his fingers through Tony’s hair and pulled him back down into a kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I’m thinking of doing something kinda weird stylistically here, in case anyone is wondering why sometimes last names are used and sometimes first. My way of approaching it is that the switch comes when the characters finally understand one another and become friends, or at least closer. idk we'll see how it goes!


	4. something in common

“Dammit,” Stephen breathed, slinging the damp towel around his neck as he rifled through his discarded clothing.

Tony poked his head out of the shower, looking quizzically at him. “What’s up?”

“I dropped my sling ring in the fight,” Stephen murmured. He rubbed a hand over his face. “And the books and the cloak are still in the courtyard. And I think you literally tore the front of my tunic open.” He held up the offending garment to Tony, who at least had the good graces to blush.

“Don’t know my own strength,” he muttered behind an impish smirk. “So, what’s the problem, besides the wardrobe malfunction?”

“I need the sling ring to _leave_ , Tones,” Stephen sighed, and he waved his hand in a simple repair spell.

“Afraid the Avengers are gonna see your walk of shame?” Tony chuckled. He shut off the water and stepped out, fully nude and dripping wet and grinning at the way Stephen thought he could avoid looking at him. “I’ll go,” he added, walking past Stephen and out into the room—Stephen’s eyes following, couldn’t deny how much he liked that view; stuck on the dimples of wet skin at the base of his spine, the curve of—

“Are you staring at my ass, Stephen Strange?” Tony’s voice broke his concentration, and Stephen’s eyes snapped up to where Tony was grinning at him over his shoulder.

“Um,” was all Stephen could gather before Tony broke into a fit of bright laughter. Instead, Stephen occupied himself with gathering the rest of his clothing from the floor and trying his best to ignore Tony’s giddy chiding.

“Get dressed, Tony,” Stephen laughed, slipping into the last of his too many layers. One of the ties that Tony had torn off wasn’t exactly as good as new, so Stephen just let it hang open. 

The sun was still out, shining through the windows and just lighting up Tony’s face, his dripping hair, the soft look in his eye that Stephen wasn’t sure he was meant to see.

To hell with it, he thought as he slipped out of Tony’s door. To hell with anyone that wasn’t mature enough to conceive of the idea that two consenting adults in a relationship might screw around on the occasion. To hell with judgment, to hell with gossip; he was in love with Tony Stark, and just had some mind-blowing things done to him, and he was in a good fucking mood.

But obviously, thinking it and living it were two quite different things. Because as soon as Stephen rounded a corner and ran into Wanda, his face exploded with color. She took in the state of him with one sweep of her sad eyes, and she was quick to drop her gaze. There was no possible way she could have missed the post-Tony look plastered all over Stephen.

“Sorry—” she tried to excuse herself, brush past him.

“Wanda,” he said after her, and she stopped still at his voice, her head hanging.

He hardly knew the girl. But he knew that she had come to him. She had asked him to help her. And he was going to do just that. 

If he had learned anything by teaching Tony, it was that the emotional state of a practitioner could have a huge effect on their magic. And this young woman was in no state to be slinging the kind of spells that sent wizards flying off of balconies.

Wanda half-turned, her hands balling into nervous fists at her side. 

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she began.

Stephen paused, considered his options. “I’m going to sit for a while,” he said, and he nodded to the lounge at the end of the hall. She followed his eyes, and then she followed him. Sat in a plush chair in silence, worrying her fingers together.

Stephen folded his hands on the table between them, and he didn’t say a word. He didn’t press her, didn’t interrogate. Helping Tony through his trauma—and Tony helping him through his—taught him that sometimes not talking was the best answer.

She took her time to gather herself, and after a handful of seconds, she opened her mouth. 

“Maybe I’m jealous.” Her mouth twisted into a sad smile. She still hadn’t raised her eyes.

“Of me?” Stephen asked incredulously. 

A little bitter laugh left her, and she grimaced in regret. “No. Of Stark. Of… of all of them.” She brushed the hanging hair from her eyes, but still didn’t look up. “We all lost someone, when Thanos came,” Wanda said stiffly, and he saw her wipe absently at her eye, looked anywhere but the inquisitive inspection of Stephen Strange. “Everyone here had someone taken from them. I’m the only one that didn’t get someone back.”

She swung her gaze back around to face him. He found her full of resolve, but even that was buried under heavy sorrow, too much regret, a fledgeling anger. Her next breath came in stuttering, and she tried to hide it with a frown. And further tears hitched up in her throat, though she stubbornly denied them. They hung on her like a cloak, pulling her head down until it nearly touched the table’s surface. 

Stephen knew about Vision, even though he’d never had the pleasure of meeting him. He knew very little about artificial intelligence, but from what he’d gathered about Vision was that he had been more human than some of the humans Stephen had known. And Stephen _also_ knew about Pietro Maximoff; more than anything about the boy, he knew that no one ever talked about him. Wanda was still carrying both of them on her shoulders, one hand in either of hers and dragging them with her.

“I…” Stephen began, and his voice hesitated just enough to cause Wanda to look up. Tears shining in her eyes alongside a tiny curiosity—it wasn’t often Doctor Strange was at a loss for words. “I had a sister.”

Silence descended on them, but not hard or desolate. Deafening like a snowfall on an early winter’s night, like the sound had been sucked out of the world around them—but not frightening, not terrible. Wanda’s shoulders dropped, the anxiety oozing out of her with a sad little exhalation. Painful understanding flooded into the space it left behind, and another sob hitched into her throat. 

“I had a little sister,” Stephen said, very quietly, barely above a whisper. His own throat bobbed with the emotion he tamped fervently back down into his stomach. “Her name was April.”

Wanda’s hands had ceased their nervous kneading, and she was watching him with a sad curiosity. Stephen took a breath. A little smile kicked up one corner of his mouth. 

“She was a brat,” he said—and it was enough to make a little laugh rise out of Wanda’s constricted lungs. “And I gave her a hard time, like any big brother is supposed to do. Maybe too hard, sometimes. But…” 

“You loved her,” Wanda finished for him, her sad smile reflected on Stephen’s face.

“I still do. She’s the reason I became a doctor. I wanted to help her.”

“She was sick?” Wanda asked, sitting forward in her chair.

Stephen nodded. “But I couldn’t... I couldn’t save her.” 

His eyes fixed on Wanda, and there was a sudden understanding between them almost as tangible as a wire—pulled taut and vibrating as though it had been struck. She nodded, fighting back the tears that struggled to flood out of her.

Wanda took Stephen’s scarred hand in both of her own, held it gently.

Stephen took a hard breath. He hadn’t told anyone about April. Not Wong, not even Tony. Christine only knew because she’d seen a picture he thought he’d hidden well enough and had forced the story out of him. He could say that he was more than qualified to sympathize.

“I know that we’re not quite friends,” Stephen said after a long silence, “and I’m not exactly a therapist. But I understand, Wanda.”

“We’re not friends?” Wanda asked, and at the way his eyes ticked up in confusion, a little silent laugh shook in her shoulders. “I’m sorry for throwing you off a balcony, Stephen,” she added, smiling.

Stephen laughed, low but honest. “It’s not the worst thing a student’s done to me.”

Wanda’s grin pulled up even further at the edges. “What did he do?”

“He blew me up, once,” Stephen chuckled.

They spoke in quiet voices, his hand trapped in hers, about the trials and tribulations of teaching Tony Stark. And the sadness and anxiety almost tangibly flowed out of her, bringing out a smile that hadn’t seen the sun in weeks. 

The sound of urgent footsteps broke them from their moment, especially when it was Tony himself that rounded the corner into the lounge.

And he stopped dead in his tracks, stared at the two of them. Wanda pulled her hands back to her lap, linked her fingers together tight enough for her knuckles to go white.

“Tony?” Stephen asked, and he rose from his chair.

“Hey,” Tony said—and there was something strange in his voice, something weak and struggling. “You were… just taking a long time, and… I guess you found something else to do.” He cleared his throat in a way that sounded like it hurt. And he strode quickly away from them, back the way he’d come.

Stephen’s eyes flicked to Wanda, but she waved a hand in the direction Tony had disappeared. “I’m feeling better. He’s not.”

So Stephen nodded thankfully in return, and rushed after him. 

“Tony,” he said, but not loudly. It still managed to stop Tony hard in the middle of the hall. He rounded on Stephen, clearly deep in thought with his brows drawn down in pain. He opened his mouth, and it bobbed with unsaid words—he rubbed a shaking hand down his face, tried to ignore the tremor that was taking him, seizing him from the chest outward.

Stephen hesitated, held out a hand questioningly— _can I come in_? Tony nodded, sucking in a breath hard enough for Stephen to hear even at a distance. And Stephen took those few steps to close their gap, to pull Tony into his arms and press a solid kiss to his temple.

“Feel my breath, Tones?” Stephen murmured, took Tony’s hand and held it to his own chest. “Just like that. It’s going to pass, just breathe with me.”

“It’s so stupid,” Tony blurted between deep breaths. Didn’t raise his head from where he’d tucked it into Stephen’s shoulder. “I can’t—”

“You don’t have to talk,” Stephen told him.

Tony nodded into his shoulder.

Stephen’s eyes ticked up at the sight of motion from a doorway just in time to see that Romanoff was watching them. _Had been_ watching them, he realized, from her knowing stance and expression. Stephen’s mouth pressed into an annoyed little line, and he made a small motion for her to _leave_.

At first, she narrowed her eyes at him. It was obviously the doorway of her own room that she was standing in, and perhaps she felt he had no right to tell her what to do in her own home—himself only a guest at the Compound, even after all this time. But then her eyes took in the rest of the scene, tracked their closeness and Stephen’s careful handling of Tony (whose face was so deep in Stephen’s folds that he still hadn’t seen her), the way Stephen subsequently ignored her presence to count out Tony’s breath with him.

Stephen caught Natasha’s eyes again, and there was suddenly something very human in her face. She nodded once at him, and very quietly stepped back into her room and closed the door.

“I can stay,” Stephen said into Tony’s hair, fingers curled at the back of Tony’s neck.

Tony’s fingers gripped protectively into Stephen’s chest where he’d placed them. “You don’t…”

“Do you want me to?”

Tony exhaled a hard breath. “Yeah.”

Stephen pulled away, just a hair. “I’ll need some help getting the books up to your room, then.”

Tony blinked at him, not quite understanding—surely Stephen could use all kinds of magic to help carry some books—and then something melted inside him. Stephen wasn’t going to abandon him, even for something as trivial as going downstairs to get the books.

The cloak popped up from where it had settled in one of the chairs, circled happily around Tony and clamped onto his shoulders. Stephen gathered the books (Tony insisted on carrying one; he’d been asked to help, after all), retrieved the sling ring from the ground, and they completely ignored the world around them as they made their way back up to Tony’s room. Any other Avengers that had peered out at them, asked them anything, was peripheral at best. 

All that mattered, at that moment, were Tony and Stephen (and the cloak, almost as persistent in showing its affection for Tony as Stephen was).

+++

“I’m not completely oblivious, Tony.” Stephen looked up from the desk—Tony had cleared a space for him to shelve the books, at least temporarily.

Tony didn’t glance up from the one that Stephen had lent to him—stuffed into a nest of scattered pillows and huge, warm blankets; turning a yellowed page and scanning the words with interest.

“Oblivious about what?” Tony asked, fiddling with the corner of one of the pages.

“You’re worried about Wanda.” Stephen saw Tony’s face press into a jumbled mess of emotions. “Specifically about me and Wanda.”

Tony snapped the book shut, glaring across his room at the sorcerer. “I don’t—” He stopped himself, tried again. “No idea what you’re—” Tony inhaled sharply, and opened the book again to a random page.

Stephen’s confusion slowly built into a sly grin. “Tony Stark, are you _jealous_?”

“Okay, so what if I am?” Tony snapped. 

Thankfully, before he exploded out of his blankets and off the bed toward Stephen’s position, he had set the book safely aside. The sorcerer turned in the chair, looking plaintively up at Tony—standing with a loose nervousness that practically radiated off of him, even with his arms crossed and trying to seem unapproachable.

“It took me most of the time I was stuck in that time loop to get you to like me even a little bit,” Tony started in, waving one of his arms restlessly. “You didn’t exactly open yourself up. The first few hours you were kind of an asshole.”

Stephen opened his mouth to protest, and then shrugged. He was probably right about that.

“But as soon as Wanda shows up, you guys are pals?” Tony waded even deeper. “Hell, you were holding hands.”

“You didn’t make it easy to like you, either, Tony,” Stephen reminded him, his voice quiet and even. “You were stubborn, impatient, irreverent—”

“And she’s not,” Tony let it sink like a rock into a pond. “She’s different.”

Stephen sighed. “She’s just a girl, Tony.”

“So is Christine.”

“I—” Stephen snapped his mouth shut, wrapping his head around what Tony had just implied. “Not like _that_. I mean she’s a _girl_ , a _child_. She’s barely old enough to drink.”

“Yeah? How’s that supposed to make me feel any better?” Tony ruffled his hair with both hands, a nervous little movement that made his hair stick up at all angles. He cut back in: “And besides, how old are _you_ , Stephen?”

“Mentally or physically?”

Tony started to laugh, somewhat derisively, before he took note of the blank, serious look on Stephen’s face. “What d’you mean, like being a kid at heart, or something?” he asked.

“I mean that I projected my mind through fourteen million possible futures,” Stephen said stoically. “Add a few years spent bargaining in the Dark Dimension… I don’t know. A few hundred years old?”

Tony’s mouth froze, hanging half open with a retort dying a slow death on his tongue. His eyes—ready for a battle just moments ago, embers still glowing somewhere deep—softened as his whole frame went slack. The fight was gone; he was in shock.

“Holy shit,” Tony breathed. The tension that had filled the air between them was gone, and they were left with an awed silence in its place.

Even Stephen rarely let his mind wander to the tricky question of how long his mind had wandered without his body, how many lives he’d lived, how long he _would_ live. And those same questions seemed to be flashing through the eyes of Tony Stark—looking down at him like someone might look at something fragile teetering on the edge of a shelf, afraid even a breath might tip it over and shatter it. He didn’t move for a very long time, just _looking_ at Stephen, his mouth still hanging half open as he processed all of it.

But then Tony’s face buckled into a playful smile, and it was all gone in a second. “I owe you so many birthdays.”

And Stephen’s unsure expression broke into a silly grin, fractured with laughter. 

It was on his tongue again. _I love you_. But something held him back, even with his mouth already open to say it. Tony didn’t seem to notice the pause, and he took Stephen’s face in both of his hands to plant a kiss on the sorcerer’s forehead.

“Sleepover at the Avengers Compound,” Tony said conspiratorially, lingering close. “Aren’t you a little old for that kinda thing?”

“I’m not living this down, am I?” Stephen asked, his smile settling into something warm and familiar, soft and loving; something he saved just for Tony.

“Oh hell no. I’m hanging onto this forever, old man,” Tony snickered, sliding his fingers through Stephen’s hair and pulling him into another kiss.

Even with their conversation about Wanda derailed, Stephen knew that they’d come back to it. Eventually they would circle back around, fall into that pit, and have to face it. But for now, he was content with Tony’s mouth on his, slow and warm and inviting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that Stephen has a sister in the comics, but rather than try to bring things from the comics in (because I know almost literally nothing about the comics verse) this version of her and their backstory is based on the 2007 animated Doctor Strange movie (on US Hulu btw). In that version, her name is April and he tries to operate on her himself, and fails to save her. I guess I'm just stupidly fond of that version.


	5. mirror dimension

Stephen arrived on Wednesday morning, opening a portal into the lobby of the Compound. He’d let Tony know when he was coming, this time, so no cereal would have to lose its life at his sudden appearance—and Tony had kept him up for hours, talking his ear off about anything that apparently came to mind. Stephen had never been one for meandering conversation before, but he loved listening to Tony talk; the excited way his voice would bounce from subject to subject, the pause right before he would ask if Stephen fell asleep.

So Tony was waiting for him when he stepped through from the Sanctum to the Compound, grinning ear to ear as he approached Stephen at a clip.

“Hey!” Tony said, pressing in for a hard kiss on Stephen’s cheek. “I got you this.”

With a flourish, Tony revealed a handful of professionally-arranged flowers—a smattering of roses and lilies, not ostentatious (especially by Stark standards). Stephen looked him up and down, an open-mouthed, surprised grin taking up most of his face. There was no trepidation in Tony’s stance—that wide smile and quirked brow belonged to the cheeky, cheerful man he fell in love with.

“What’s the occasion?” Stephen asked as he took the gift, turned the bouquet to get a good look at all of the flowers.

“Uh, Wednesday, I think,” Tony said, scratching at the hair at the back of his neck in thought. “It’s Wednesday, right?”

Stephen chuckled, something soft, which made Tony’s face break even further into a giddy smile. He cupped Tony’s face in his free hand, ran his thumb lovingly across his cheek. “Thank you, I—” The silence lasted only half a second, both it was clear that both of them felt it. 

Why couldn’t he say it? Every time, it caught in his throat like barbs instead of words. Was he afraid, suddenly? Stephen Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, afraid of three words he’d said hundreds of times over the last two months? 

Instead of thinking about it, Stephen pressed his lips to Tony’s brow, which had furrowed (even if just slightly).

“Uh, dressed down a bit, are we?” Tony asked, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he took a step back to observe Stephen’s attire. A zip-up sweater over one of Tony’s T-shirts (he’d left so many at the Sanctum at this point that Stephen was sure it wasn’t an accident), utterly casual compared to the sorcerer that had been to visit only two days ago.

“I heard someone say I wear too many layers,” Stephen said, grinning privately.

“Oh, that was me,” Tony said, even more quietly—eyeing Stephen again with a much different light in his eyes. “Y’know, for as good as you look in my clothes, I think you’d look even better without—”

A little noise behind them, a very purposeful clearing of a throat, turned both of their attention away. Rhodes, his arms akimbo and an exasperated smile that sat on him like a familiar, comfortable sweater. 

“What?” Tony asked, spreading his arms in a wide shrug. “You’re like an overbearing step-dad back there, what d’you want?”

“You’re in public, Tony,” Rhodes chuckled. 

“And you’re a grown-up, get over it.”

“Hey, Stephen,” Rhodes said around Tony, ignoring his theatrics with a kind wave. Stephen waved in return, and Rhodes nodded at the flowers in his hand. “Hope you’re not allergic. He’s got a bad track record for that.”

“Come on,” Tony groaned, running a hand down his face. “That was one time.”

“Two times,” Rhodes corrected, slamming the correct amount of fingers onto his hand. “I’m allergic to avocados, Tony. That means guacamole.”

“A lot of things are green, Rhodey!” Tony complained to the retreating back of his best friend, suddenly seized with a fit of giggles that he tried to hide behind a hand over his entire face.

And for just a moment, it was the two of them, and nothing else. Tony, red-faced and halfway through a laugh, peering over his fingers with shining brown eyes lit by the same fire that had sent the flush into his face and ears; Stephen settled into a comfortable, loving smirk, almost completely hidden by a bouquet of flowers. 

Wanda came bounding into their scene, bringing it to a rather final coda whether she’d planned to or not. “I got your text—Oh,” she said, coming to a halt (her hair swinging around her in momentum lost).

She glanced up to find them both staring at her, and it became immediately apparent that she’d interrupted something. She took a long breath, acknowledged the fragments of their moment with an awkward nod, and tried again.

“You look nice, Stephen,” she told him, and she cocked her head, a little smile flickering onto her face. “Much more approachable.”

“That was the word I was gonna use,” Tony said quickly, motioning between the two of them. “Approachable. Right.”

“Tony,” Stephen said—and Tony all but hopped to attention at the sound of his name, which brought a little laugh tumbling out of Stephen’s lungs. “You still have the books I brought over last time, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Want me to…?” He leaned on the end of the sentence that never came, hanging somewhat awkwardly in the air.

“Please,” Stephen said, and he leaned in to leave a kiss on Tony’s brow (lingered just long enough to smell the sleep still lingering on Tony; left a second, smaller kiss for his trouble). “And we should put these in water, I think.” He indicated the flowers with a nod of his head, through the daze he’d apparently left in Tony’s eyes.

“Flowers?” Wanda asked. “What’s the occasion?”

“Wednesday,” Stephen said proudly.

There would never be anything quite like the way Tony looked up at him—that slow, sappy smile; his eyes bowing under the weight of affection, brows tilting just so slightly upward; his shoulders dropping with a listless, giddy sigh; all of it fixed on _him_ , like he was worthy of that face. And Stephen always went weak in the knees, absolutely punch-drunk and crazy about the man that face belonged to.

The things he would have done if Wanda hadn’t been there. 

As it was, Stephen turned to his newest pupil and made a silent gesture for her to follow. And he threw a wink over his shoulder at Tony as they parted. He could hear Tony’s wonderful laughter all the way down the hallway.

The lounge that had been the scene for their impromptu conversation two days ago seemed to make the best setting for the day’s lesson—and that lesson, apparently, was deep in the books that Tony set down on the table Wanda was seated at. Stephen handed over his flowers, which Tony took a moment to admire before he set them in the vase Wanda had found.

“These are some of the tomes Wong managed to scrounge up from the library at Kamar-Taj,” Stephen said, and he opened the one in his hand to the first pages. “I don’t need to explain what sorcery is, you’ve been dabbling in whatever energies you tap into since the mind stone imbued you with your powers. What I _can_ do is help you to find focus.”

“Like meditation?” Wanda asked with a skeptical raise of her eyebrows.

Stephen shrugged. “Not exactly. A bit.” 

He steadied himself with a breath, flicked his eyes sideways to find Tony looking at him. How had this been simultaneously easier and more difficult with Tony? They had both come to him asking for help, there was no difference in that. Maybe it was the urgency with which he’d been saddled when teaching Tony, or maybe it was Wanda’s eagerness as she approached the idea of their lessons.

Stephen crossed his arms. “What I gathered from sparring with you on Monday—when I wasn’t falling three stories—” He smirked past the wince that spasmed onto Wanda’s face. “—was that your power may outweigh your intent. If there’s some method in these books, I intend to find it and use it to help you focus your energy. Even if that means meditating,” he added, much to Tony’s amusement.

Both Stephen and Wanda looked up when Tony laughed. He didn’t exactly shrink from their combined gaze, but he seemed to acknowledge that his presence was no longer necessary.

“I’ll, uh… let you two get to it, then,” Tony said, awkwardly clasping his hands and wandering backwards away from them. 

“Thank you,” Stephen said, handing a book to Wanda.

“You know where I live, if you need an expert, or anything.” Tony made a strange gesture, pointing at his room down the hall with both hands, and spelled an embarrassed grimace with his features before he turned and left them in the lounge at a quick pace.

Only minutes later, both of them staring at the same book as Stephen translated the Sanskrit aloud, loud music— _Thunderstruck_ , AC/DC, September 1990—belted down the hall from Tony’s room. A laugh caught in Stephen’s throat. Sometimes, that man could be absolutely childish.

+++

Over the next week, every two days, Stephen arrived at the Avengers Compound. Sometimes with a handful of books, sometimes with the cloak in tow. The desk space that Tony had leant him was overcrowded by now—not toppling, not that he would have told Wong if they had been.

And over that week, Stephen found himself with more flowers than he knew what to do with. It seemed that Tony was trying to outdo himself with each passing day. At first it was the single bouquet, then it was two. And then Tony had wrangled an entire van’s worth of carnations and lilies and roses and daisies and—

“That’s... a lot of flowers,” was all Stephen had managed to say at first, staring wide-eyed as a line of delivery boys hefted what seemed like literal piles of flowers into the lobby of the Avengers Compound (all over the tables in the lounge just inside the door; the chairs; the confused arms of Natasha and Clint as they stood in one of the nearby doorways).

For one second, Tony looked devastated. And Stephen immediately perked up to placate him. “They’re all lovely, thank you, Tony—”

“God, I guess I went overboard,” Tony cracked through a hopeless, embarrassed laugh—the line of flower shop employees still streaming between them. “Wow, that bought _way_ more flowers than I thought it would.” 

Clint might still be laughing somewhere, Stephen neglected to check on him.

“Doctor,” Rogers said on the next Wednesday morning, halfway through pouring his coffee when Stephen appeared in the Compound’s kitchen. Stephen looked up, and the books that had been following after him crashed into his back with no notice of lost momentum—books tumbling to the floor behind him. Stephen sighed, washed his hand over the heat in his face, and knelt to pick them up (and Rogers was laughing, but not out of spite).

Steve handed one of the books to Stephen, on one knee beside him to help with the carnage. Stephen looked up, found a little smile hanging on Steve’s face, and reflected it.

“Thank you, Captain.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Steve said, lifting a few of the books under one arm and standing. “We’ve got a few empty rooms in the Compound.”

Stephen narrowed his eyes as he stood to meet him—not quite eye-to-eye with peak physical perfection. A confused smile worked its way onto Stephen’s mouth.

“Are you asking me to move in, Captain?”

Steve laughed. “No, I think that’d be Tony’s call.” The sly smirk on Captain America’s face was enough to make Stephen blush. “What I’m saying is that we’ve got somewhere you can put your books, and somewhere quiet to read them. I know we don’t make for the best study environment.”

Stephen began to nod, very slowly. “That would be... very helpful, actually. Tony doesn’t have much in the way of shelf space.”

By the time the two of them had made their way to the domestic side of the Compound, Wanda had joined them. She had found them at a crossroads, brimming with youthful enthusiasm. She eagerly took one of the books from Steve’s arms, flicked through it as they walked.

“Is this Korean?” she asked, eyes over the aging pages.

“Fifth century Korean,” Stephen said over his shoulder. 

“Ah,” Wanda said with an airy laugh. “Do _you_ know fifth century Korean?”

“I only like it for the pictures,” Stephen drawled. And when she didn’t laugh, he did. “I’ll help you translate,” he said instead. She smirked and handed the book over to him.

They came to a halt in front of a nondescript door, and Stephen noted that it was in the same hallway as Wanda’s—three doors away and on the other side. Steve laid a hand on the doorknob, and he nodded at the plain door.

“There should be plenty of room for books, and I can—”

“No,” Wanda said very sharply, voice terribly thin. “No, we can’t use this room.”

One of Stephen’s eyebrows shot up, and he turned to her. Her face had gone white, and she stood incredibly still. Stephen opened his mouth to begin a question, when Steve held out a hand to stop her.

“Wanda, I think it’s time we—”

“You can’t take it,” Wanda bit back in, her hands balled at her side and shaking furiously through the effort it took to speak. “It’s _his_ room, you don’t have the _right_.”

Suddenly, horribly, Stephen understood. This wasn’t just any unused room. This room had belonged to Vision. 

“We can take a different room,” Stephen offered, trying to diffuse the situation he knew was already starting to boil over.

“He’s coming back!” Wanda shouted.

Stephen felt the energy in the hall pulse outward from her—it stole the air out of his lungs, and staggered him; just how powerful _was_ she? Tears gathered in her eyes, rolled down her face.

“He’s coming back,” she repeated, and all that strength seemed stolen out of her. She sucked in another breath, and without a word, she spun on heel and fled down the hall the way they’d come.

“Wanda!” Steve called, his strong face pinched into something sad, sympathetic.

“Hold these for me, please,” Stephen said, stacking the remaining books over into Steve’s huge arms and taking off down the hall after Wanda.

As soon as he had her in his sights, Stephen cast his hands into a familiar configuration and slammed them out between them. The Mirror Dimension crackled into existence around them, trapping them together in a world of reflection and silence.

Wanda skidded to a halt, her little gasp echoing around them as it pinged off every shard around her. Stephen dropped his hands, slowed to a halt some feet behind her. Even as she gazed around her at their new surroundings, the tension hadn’t gone from her—she was still shaking, her tear-lined face reflected dozens of times around her.

“What is this?” she asked, her voice breathy.

“The Mirror Dimension,” Stephen said quietly, though his voice still carried and bounced around them. “A place parallel to our own reality but separated from it entirely. It’s a place that can be used to trap threats, or safely practice sorcery.”

Her voice hitched back into tears, though she tried to stand tall against them. “Am I a threat?”

“No,” Stephen sighed—knew that he’d be misinterpreted in his intentions, “no. We don’t lock kids away in the Mirror Dimension.”

And he’d really stepped in it this time. He could tell by the way her wet eyes turned down at him, almost as if they were filled with a scarlet light of their own.

“A kid?” she breathed.

Stephen could practically see the dragonsmoke anger rolling off of her, seething just out of focus, like an offshore storm. She gathered her next breath, threw her back straight and indignant with a terrible grimace of disgust.

“Everyone calls me a child! What an excuse!” she cried (energy billowing like wind through a curtain across her knuckles). “I’ve seen my family killed, my country destroyed, my brother—” 

Her face went horribly pale as she stopped that thought hard in its tracks, and without further warning, angry tears poured from her eyes. She rallied against them, pushed through.

“This power, this _gift_ ,” she sneered at the phrase. “I used it to kill Vision. I _killed him_ with my own hands, Stephen! I watched him die _twice_ , the man I love! Do _not_ tell me I am a child!”

He stood in the aftermath of her voice, dazed. And she was right. He may have sympathized with her trauma, but he hadn’t been able to look past it to the young woman behind. Whether it was his ignorance or arrogance, he hadn’t seen her for who she was. Her entire body shook with pent-up, unspent emotion—fury, sorrow, pain; all of it that she’d tried so hard to hide. Stephen let his breath out in a little sigh, and his shoulders dropped into something less threatening (he hoped).

“I’m sorry, Wanda,” he said, low and honest, meeting her solidly in the eye. “I didn’t mean to…” Still arrogant, he thought; making it about you again, Stephen. He gathered his thoughts, and even in that second, he saw the emotion sloughing off of her. “I’m sorry.”

Her hand wiped the tear tracks from her face, in a quick way that suggested that she’d only just realized she’d been crying at all.

“So you won’t tell me to be a big girl and suck it up?”

It struck Stephen in the chest, somewhere deep down and vulnerable. Somewhere he hadn’t felt something in a long time, like a string wrapped too tightly around his insides and squeezing. Something strong that had been kept hidden for years, and was clawing to get out, now. Protective, a sudden surge of it rising almost like bile in his throat.

“Are they telling you to just get over it?” Stephen asked, his face suddenly pinched and angry, and he took a firm step in her direction.

She blinked up at him, and there was a new look on her face, too. A little sad and a little small, but shining. It burst out of her in a fresh run of tears, caught in her breath as she tried to stop the sob in her throat. Tried to hold it back—to hold _herself_ back.

“Wanda,” Stephen said directly, and he took the remaining two steps to take the space directly in front of her. She couldn’t meet his eye, not with the waterworks spilling from her own. “This is the Mirror Dimension,” he said again, and he gripped one of her shoulders tightly, grounding her. “Nothing you do here can be seen or heard by the rest of the world. Nothing out there can hurt you when you’re in here, and the only thing that you can hurt is me—and you’re not going to.”

Their eyes met, and he gave her a solid nod.

“Let it out,” he told her. 

And she did.

After only the briefest moment of apprehension, of worry, Wanda let it out. She opened her mouth and she _screamed_. The sound of her anguish echoed hundreds of times, keening out of her in every reflection. Her hands gripped into terrible fists, and energy slammed out of her—every emotion swirling scarlet around her body like a storm. Stephen threw up a shield, let the wave of her terror and her anger hit him, push him backwards. But it didn’t hurt him.

Wanda screamed again, squeezed her eyes shut against it, just to hear the sound of her own voice pinging back against her. Held her hands to her eyes and fell to her knees, the pounding waves of her power lashing uselessly at the Mirror Dimension—railing against Stephen’s shield to no avail. A storm surge crashing against his rocks, all the raw power (her raw throat, screaming) exploding out of her. All of her energy pealed out like a wounded animal, roaring and whirling and—

And then it stopped. Suddenly, she was just Wanda, crying and slumped almost to the floor. Fighting with her tears for breath, the waterfall of her hair interrupted only by her fingers gripping hopelessly at her head.

Stephen came to one knee beside her, but didn’t say anything. He waited for her to raise her head, messily wipe the tears from her red eyes. With her next breath, she steadied herself, and she looked at him.

“I loved him,” she said weakly, pushed the hair out of her eyes. “I loved him so much, Stephen. They tell me that he didn’t die for nothing, but they don’t talk about him. As though ignoring it will make it easier. As if I should pretend that he never loved me.”

Stephen didn’t know what to say. What could you possibly say to someone who had lost so much? 

“Stark,” she said, tucking her legs under her more comfortably, feathered her hair behind her ear as she observed Stephen with wet eyes. “You love him, don’t you?”

Stephen felt a little jolt in his heart, and he took a sharp breath to hide it. “Of course I do.”

“And he loves you?”

“Well I—” Stephen’s sentence came to a dead stop, syllables crashing to the floor as they died on his tongue. “I—” He tried again, tried to force the words out of his lungs. Of course he did, Stephen told himself with some still-functioning part of his brain that wasn’t occupied with the question at hand. Of course Tony loved him, he’d bought him a literal van full of flowers. Of course.

But…

But Stephen realized that he’d never heard Tony say it. Stephen had said it more times than he could remember, but Tony had never strung those words together. And quite suddenly, Stephen knew exactly why he’d felt so apprehensive (so paranoid) lately. Why he’d hesitated, why Tony’s overcompensation for his jealously had struck him so oddly. _Of course_... but… 

_Did_ Tony love him? 

“Stephen?” Wanda’s voice brought him out of his desperate spiral, and by the look on her face, she had said his name more than once. He must have looked like a scared, trapped animal, by the way she was looking at him. 

“I’m fine.” He cleared his throat and nodded. “Are you?”

She took a breath—she knew that he was avoiding the question, that much was obvious. But she let him.

“Better,” she said. “This was… cathartic.”

Stephen smirked. “I’m glad I could help.” He stood, and extended a hand to help her to her feet, which she took gladly. “Wanda, we don’t need to take that room—”

“No,” she said, heaving a breath out of her frame. “I’m sure he won’t… _wouldn’t_ mind if we keep your books there for now. For now,” she said again, forcing it out. 

Stephen turned at the movement in the corner of his eye, and he found that both Steve and Tony were in the hall together (funny, they never seemed to occupy the same space unless Stephen was involved), searching for wherever the two of them had disappeared to. Stephen smirked, and he turned back to find something small—almost like a smile—on Wanda’s face.

“Shall we?” Stephen asked.

“Shouldn’t keep them waiting.”

Using the sling ring, Stephen opened a portal directly in front of their search party, and they emerged together. Steve simply crossed his arms, looking the two of them up and down with a little private smile. Tony’s face, however, fell into something muted—far away and quiet.

“We’ll take the room,” Stephen said, closing the portal behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it may seem like this one is slower getting to the plot, but I promise it's not all set-up. I think I may be writing this one mostly for myself, but I still love writing these boys, and I hope you're enjoying it too!


	6. say something

Stephen couldn’t sleep. It was one of the nights where the visions of millions of deaths haunted the back of his eyelids (anguished cries echoed in his ears; Tony’s tears and his dead eyes seared into his brain forever). He decided that it was better to keep his eyes open and focus instead on what was real—on the present, on something that would ground him in this reality instead of the millions that had never happened.

Vases of flowers still decorated almost every available cranny of Tony’s room. Several of the flowers lined the windowsill, where there was a full moon hanging in a fully black sky. It threw a patch of soft silver light and flower-shaped shadows across the rumpled, well-used bed, and across Tony’s bare back.

Tony was turned away from him, the blanket an afterthought tangled with his legs and thrown haphazardly over half of his body—not quite snoring, but the sound of his loud breathing was more of a comfort than a distraction. His hair stuck at all angles, and Stephen somehow managed to restrain himself from running his fingers all through that hair to fix it.

A little smile hung on Stephen’s lips, something a little sad and a little hopeless. Despite everything, here they were. Despite the death and the pain on the road that brought them, they were together. Stephen Strange and Tony Stark. That was real. 

Of course Tony loved him. It was so obvious. But…

“I love you, Tony,” Stephen said out loud to combat that sick feeling in his stomach—and it felt like a dam had broken in his throat, days of confessions pouring out of him from cracks he couldn’t stop. “ _God_ , I love you so much. More than I’ve loved anyone.” He leaned up and away from the pillow, following every line that Tony’s shape made in the bed beside him—seared _this_ image in his head to replace every bloody memory of Titan. 

“I feel like I’ve always loved you,” he said, and a silly smile ticked onto his face. “But I knew the moment I saw you dancing to Cyndi Lauper. You’re stubborn, you’re hopelessly self-sacrificing, proud. But you’re so _good_ , Tones. More kind than you’d let anyone know. That’s why I love you.”

Stephen leaned in, hesitated for just a fraction of a moment before he gently smoothed one of the cowlicks at Tony’s temple.

Tony grumbled something, stirred at his touch. “W’s wrong, baby?” he mumbled, not even opening his eyes.

And Stephen’s throat clogged back up, forced itself closed. At the long silence, Tony blinked and actually turned—looked up at him with confusion and tired distress.

“Hey,” Tony said, more lucidly. He touched Stephen’s shoulder, his neck, his face—and found the tears that Stephen didn’t even realize he’d been crying. 

Tony sat fully up to meet Stephen, the moonlight shining in his big, brown eyes. He held Stephen’s face in both of his hands, carefully cleared away any evidence of Stephen’s tears; looking him in the eye, overflowing with concern (with adoration).

“Hey,” Tony said again, more quietly. “You with me, sweetheart?”

Stephen’s next breath buckled into a soft, pained little laugh. “Bad dream,” was all he said—held one of Tony’s hands firmly where it was still cupped to his face, kept them connected.

“I’m here.” Tony held Stephen’s hand to his mouth, kissed it three times before he opened his mouth again. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere,” Tony repeated firmly. “You can quote me on that,” he added with a tiny, wiry smile.

“I know,” Stephen breathed, let his eyes finally fall closed. With just a touch, just like that, he was safe. No terrible visions clawed at him behind closed eyes; only sleep. “I know, Tony. I—”

_I love you, I love you, I—_

“It’s three in the morning, Stephen,” Tony said, and Stephen felt him lean in to press a solid kiss to his brow. “Go to bed. We can talk when the sun’s up.”

Stephen nodded, somehow already cradled in his pillow again. The tendrils of sleep pulled him down into welcome darkness, accompanied by the soft, quiet movement of Tony’s fingers through his hair; his calm, whispered voice following Stephen all the way down into unconsciousness.

+++

Stephen found himself seated amongst the Avengers for breakfast, wearing one of Tony’s shirts and wrapped carefully in a red bathrobe that had been hanging on the back of Tony’s door. He realized that he hardly looked presentable (usually neat hair askew from sleep on one side, his own clothes on top of Tony’s pile of laundry; what would gossip-mongers have to say if they caught him like this?) but lack of sleep had a way of bringing out the less immaculate side of him.

He eyed his neighbors—Tony on one side and Wanda on the other, both of them as silent as he was as they poked their collective way through their pancakes. Across from him, Natasha had her eyes fixed pointedly on Wanda; on either side of her were Rhodes and Wilson, who had greeted each other on the way to the table and had hardly spoken a word otherwise. Stephen had seen Steve linger in the doorway from the domestic wing, but after a long moment he had turned back around and disappeared. Banner had come in for hot water for his tea and left back to the lab just as quickly as he’d appeared. It had been weeks since Stephen had seen Barnes at all.

“Did someone die last night, or something?” Clint asked, flipping another pancake onto Stephen’s plate from the pan—a feat, considering the table was a good eight feet from the stove. “This is the most _dour_ fucking breakfast probably in the history of breakfast food.”

And Tony chuckled, dribbling more and more syrup onto his plate.

“Okay, Strange spent the night,” Clint kept talking. “And it’s _not_ the first time he stole Stark’s clothes. Which, bravo, honestly—I’m surprised it’s not too short by a couple feet.”

“Clint,” Natasha tried to tame him. But the archer only smirked in reply and pushed onward.

“We’re all grown-ups here, Nat,” Clint said, a glimmer in his eye. 

“At least some of us act like it,” Wilson laughed.

There was another long silence, punctuated only by the stab of metal forks to ceramic plates, the sizzle of pancakes from Clint’s pan. Stephen leaned forward, his hands clasped on the table in front of him, peering at the gathered Avengers. He took a long breath, and he saw Tony glance up (as if Tony somehow knew the tone of that breath; knew Stephen so well to know that something unpleasant was going to come out of his mouth).

“So, we’re not going to talk about it,” he said in a low, dire voice.

Heads popped up around the table to stare at him, though not all. Wanda fervently kept her face down.

“I said it’s fine if you wanna wander around in a robe,” Clint said, twirling the spatula absently. “You—”

“About Wanda,” Stephen said, cutting firmly into Clint’s sentence with very little room for argument in his tone. “You’re not going to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” Rhodes asked, and he sat up just slightly. His eyes glanced to Wanda once, then back to Stephen. “What happened?”

“Stephen,” Wanda said very quietly, though she never raised her eyes. “You don’t—”

“Yesterday, one of your friends had a breakdown,” Stephen said—his tone clipped, but calm. “I know that Captain Rogers was there for it, and I guess it’s obvious that he didn’t bother to tell the rest of you. I wonder if it’s something else that you’ve all decided to ignore.”

There was a long, frosty silence that followed. Some inner part of Stephen chided himself for his attitude—he barely knew most of these people, and he was well on his way to actively scolding them. But, he also had to admit, he had never been one to keep his opinion to himself, unpopular or not. Maybe it made him an asshole. But he was an asshole with principles, dammit.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Wilson asked, his face pinched in confusion (maybe the most words that Wilson had spoken to him at a time; or Stephen to him).

“Vision,” Stephen said curtly, and the name dropped into the room like a brick through a window—the shards of their previous quiet rained to the floor at Stephen’s feet as loud as gunshots in comparison.

He couldn’t say that he’d knowingly ruined many breakfasts, but as he pushed his chair away from the table and stood, Stephen felt that the very temperature in the room had changed. Wanda’s fork shook in her fingers, and she dared to look up at him. If he didn’t know her better, he’d say that she looked scared.

“He’s dead, and apparently,” Stephen trod all over the broken shards of his tentative peace with the Avengers, “no one feels that it’s appropriate to check in on the person that had to kill him.”

“Hey,” Rhodes said as calmly as he could (a mediator, but still a military man). “Stephen, I know you went hand-to-hand with Thanos like the rest of us, but you weren’t _there_.”

“It doesn’t matter if I was,” Stephen said solidly. “There’s a bigger problem here than who was fighting what battle. Someone you purport to care about is struggling, and none of you have even _noticed_.” He took another breath, saw the way Tony’s mouth had fallen open (staring up at him from his chair like was a different person altogether) but pressed through it. “Wanda’s worried she can’t control her powers forever, but she felt like she had to come to _me_ , almost a complete stranger, to get help.”

“She never said anything—” Clint tried to cut back in, gain some footing. But Stephen trampled right back over him.

“And why would she? If this is the kind of reception that dissent gets with the Avengers, I wouldn’t tell you, either.” He tried to hide the way that his fingers shook by tightening them into fists. “You say that you have a family here. Why don’t you try _showing_ it? Because to me, this still looks like a house divided.”

He gave a final nod to cement his feelings on the subject. 

No one said anything. Not Clint, not Wanda, not even Tony. They all stared at him (at one another) in complete silence, as though still processing what he’d said. And it struck him more starkly than it had in months. Stephen Strange wasn’t an Avenger. He was still an outside party, a visitor, one of Tony’s overnight dalliances. After everything, he still wasn’t one of them. 

He swallowed whatever hard feelings that had calcified in his throat, and he walked away. Turned from the table and left them all to eat in whatever stew he left behind him.

Before Stephen could get too far down the hallway, he heard a quick set of footsteps following him. He turned, expecting Tony. He found Clint Barton rushing after him, and coming to a quick stop beside him. 

“Strange,” Clint said, and for once since Stephen had known him, his voice was quiet and measured. “Stephen. Hey, I really had no idea.”

Stephen blinked, took it in. There was hard concern scrawled all across Clint’s usually grinning face, oddly sober now. Clint ruffled a nervous hand through his hair, shot a look back over his shoulder to the kitchen (and the growing noise of conversation) behind them.

“God, I’m an actual _dad_ , you’d think I’d notice something big like this,” Clint agonized, voice strained. “You’re goddamn right, I should’ve seen it sooner. We’re still just mixed up after the Accords, and jumping right back together after Thanos like nothing happened…” He uttered a hard exhale, averted his eyes.

Stephen’s shoulders settled. Maybe he wasn’t an Avenger. But maybe he could still help.

“You’re not Wanda’s father,” Stephen said, mirroring Clint’s hushed tone. Clint’s eyes migrated back, a bit taken aback but silent. “You’re her friend. You're not obligated to carry her entire emotional burden, but you can certainly try to help.”

“See, this is where _being there_ would seriously help your perspective,” Clint said, sighing. “Because I literally got her into this mess, got her involved in all this Avengers shit.”

“I’ve read the files,” Stephen told him, nodding. “Just talk to her, Clint. For God’s sake, say something.”

Clint laughed, just once and very small, but his familiar, quirky smile was back. “Are we paying you to be our therapist?”

“You couldn’t afford me,” Stephen drawled, smirking.

+++

Stephen was mostly back into his own clothes by the time Tony had caught up with him. Back in Tony’s room, robe thrown over the foot of the bed, and stepping into his own trousers. He heard Tony enter and shut the door behind him—maybe a little forcefully, enough to make Stephen turn with a single eyebrow raised.

Tony’s face was a jumble of thrown-together emotion that didn’t mix well, as if he had trouble sorting them out himself. Some confusion, some trepidation, but a heavy swirl of what was most definitely anger gathering like dark clouds in Tony’s eyes, which were burning right into him.

“Tony?” Stephen asked, dropped what he was doing to take a few steps toward him.

Tony held up one hand, very sharply, to stop Stephen in his tracks. “What the hell was that?” he asked—and there was something unsure and small in his voice, shaking just slightly.

Stephen narrowed his eyes, took a single breath before he spoke. “You weren’t there when she broke down. She’s bottled up _so much_ —”

“You’re not dating Wanda,” Tony said, completely sideswiping Stephen, blowing his train of thought off its track.

“What—” was all Stephen managed at first—choked, confused, affronted. “Of course I’m not.”

“But she’s all you can talk about,” Tony refuted, leaning into it. “That whole outburst at breakfast was all about Wanda and everything she’s going through that the rest of us know nothing about. I get it, but I lost Vision, too, Stephen!” Tony’s finger poked hard into his own chest, and his voice grew louder at the self-provocation. “I lost you, and Peter, and half the goddamn universe! I lost one of my best friends to the Accords, and I still don’t have him back! Cap can’t even stand to eat _breakfast_ in the same room as me! But you can stand up to the Avengers for _her_!”

Accusations hung in the air, almost physically darkening the space between them. Something in Stephen reeled up against them, and another part of him tried to hold it back—the part that acknowledged Tony’s points, the pain that had suddenly formed lines in Tony’s forehead. The former unfortunately won out, and Stephen took a sharp breath to begin the battle.

“That sounds completely selfish, you know,” Stephen rebutted (hands shaking at his side).

“And you’re _completely_ selfless,” Tony snapped sarcastically. 

“I don’t protect the Sanctum for _my_ sake, Tony,” Stephen practically seethed at the accusations. “It’s not about _me_.”

“Well, believe it or not,” Tony fought back, doubling down, “you’re not perfect, Doctor Strange!”

“And _you_ are?”

“I don’t claim to be!” Tony shouted, gesticulating wildly. “I _never_ claimed to be!”

“Some kind of ‘golden child’,” Stephen shot back, reaching far back for the jab. “A _prodigy_. Genius, billionaire, philanthropist. A little big-headed, I think.”

“Don’t you fucking twist my words,” Tony bit, pointing harshly at him now. “There’s a few choice quotes I could pull out for you if I wanted to. And I _know_ there’s something you’re not telling me.”

Stephen’s ire dissipated like a mist in the sunlight, completely thrown. Tony drove right into it, stepped up into Stephen’s space.

“I’m not stupid,” Tony said, somehow took up much more space than a man his size should have. “I can see when you clam up, like you’re about to say something but you don’t. Why d’you suddenly feel like you can’t tell me something?” 

He exhaled sharply, clawed his hands backward through his hair. And the anger was gone in an instant, replaced with a new, hopeless look—staring up at Stephen, suddenly despondent. 

“You gotta _talk_ to me, Stephen.”

And Stephen just froze. The mixture of fear and indignation, love and paranoia, hit him hard enough in the gut to make him feel sick. He could barely open his mouth (words like ‘I love you’ and ‘please tell me you love me too’ perched to dive but too afraid of the plunge), couldn’t say anything. Stuck, open-mouthed and staring. He was an idiot, why couldn’t he just _say something_?

Tony threw up his arms, frustrated, and paced away from him. Paced for a long, hard second that felt like years. When Tony turned back, his face was choked with bitterness and a distant sadness.

“Okay, well, if you’re not gonna talk, maybe you should just go home.”

It was a simple request. It shouldn’t have stuck in Stephen’s chest, right in his heart, twisting and digging. He took a breath around it, swallowed the first words that came to mind, and rose to his feet. 

“All right,” was all he managed to say, and even that felt too weak. He nodded—once, hard; something that felt too final—and moved to the door.

He realized, halfway through generating a portal back to the Sanctum, that their voices had gathered an audience in the hall. Far down, Stephen could see Clint and Wanda watching him, a strange anticipation on both of their faces. Biting back the storm of emotion that had whipped itself up in Stephen’s chest, he couldn’t even acknowledge their presence. 

Stephen stepped through the portal to his own room and closed it succinctly behind him.

He wasn’t an Avenger. He was a Master of the Mystic Arts, Protector of the New York Sanctum. And he was alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was admittedly hard to write, hence why it took so long to get it up. Part of me really hates conflict, I suppose, and maybe I struggle with finding the right amount of conflict without making it cartoonish or cliche. I hope it still manages to live up to expectations. These boys are still killing me


	7. man in the mirror

Wong stared, stone-faced and silent. He poured himself another cup to tea, just let Stephen stew in the waves of judgment radiating out of him. Folded his hands on the table in front of him, barely even blinking through his disbelieving scrutiny.

“You’re an idiot,” Wong said dryly.

“You really have the gift of insight, don’t you?” Stephen groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“What are you doing here, Stephen?” Wong shook his head, utterly exasperated. 

“He said I should go, and I went,” Stephen snapped, bit his tongue and looked away.

Wong’s glare burned deeper than an actual fire. “Incredible. You may be more of an idiot than I originally thought.”

Stephen buried his face in one of his hands, grumbled something rude into his palm so Wong couldn’t hear it. Wong leaned across the table, and he tapped Stephen hard on the forehead to bring him back to task—the look on Stephen’s face as it reemerged somewhere between affronted and amused.

“Stop hiding from your mistakes,” Wong said rather sharply. “A sorcerer doesn’t run from his problems, and the Sanctum isn’t a safehouse. You’ve made a mess for yourself, and if you value everything you’ve built to this point, you will stop this childish hiding and go back.”

“It sounds so _stupid_ when you say it out loud like that,” Stephen grumbled.

Wong chuckled. “You’re even starting to sound like him.” He eased off of his tirade, if only slightly. “You’re a very smart man, Stephen, and an incredibly capable sorcerer. But there’s still much for you to learn.”

“What, about love?” Stephen scoffed. “Don’t sound so much like a romance novel, Wong.” He did a brief double-take. “Don’t tell me—”

“You still have much to learn about me, as well,” Wong said cryptically, smirking.

Wong rose from the table, and Stephen wondered if that was all the lecture he was going to get. But Wong soon returned with what appeared to be a copy of the magazine that seemed to make most of its money on Avengers gossip, tossing it down on the table in front of Stephen.

“Oh please,” Stephen growled, shoving it it away to arm’s length. “That’s the last thing I need right now.”

“Just read page fourteen,” Wong said, and he patiently took his seat across from Stephen again. Took a sip of his tea and waited.

With a weary sigh, Stephen opened the magazine (garish as ever with its eye-grabbing grainy pictures and popping headlines) to the page Wong had indicated. 

Sure enough, there was a picture of Stephen and Tony outside the restaurant Tony had rented out for their date. The title shouted in neon-colored letters: _Tony Stark Rents Entire Restaurant for the Night! Staff Tells All!_

He leveled a searing glare at Wong, who shook his head. “Not me,” was all he said, gesturing for Stephen to read on. 

Stephen only had to read to the second paragraph to realize why Wong had wanted him to see it. His eyes flicked up over the pages once, but Wong just nodded back to the print.

_Ever-altruistic Stark reportedly invited the entire staff of the restaurant to share the meal with himself and Strange. The pair posed for pictures between bites, and Strange even walked away with a new and enthusiastic fan._

_“I got to actually meet Doctor Strange,” one excited kitchen employee told this reporter. “Even before meeting him, I respected him, you know, because he worked with my uncle. But after he let us sit with them and meet them, I actually got to talk to him and found out he’s a really nice guy. I guess it just proved that he’s my favorite Avenger.”_

Stephen actually laughed. Something small and a little sad, short lived but welcome. He stopped it with a hand over his mouth, fought the little smile growing on his face. He closed the magazine, slid it away across the table, and shook his head.

“You’re a good friend, Wong,” Stephen said plainly.

On the table in front of him, Stephen’s phone vibrated loudly. 

He thought for one second that maybe Tony was trying to call him—but the number that flashed on the screen wasn’t Tony’s. Stephen’s eyes flicked up to Wong, and he gave a shrug to excuse himself as he rose from his chair and took the call.

“Wanda?” Stephen asked as a means of greeting.

“Stephen, what _happened_?” she asked, just as quick to the point. “Everyone at the Compound is in a… a frenzy. Stark’s locked himself in the lab. He won’t even let Rhodey in.” In the pause on her end of the line, Stephen could vaguely hear Clint’s voice, but what he was saying was lost over the distance. “Should I come to the Sanctum?” she asked after a moment.

Stephen sighed, found that he was pacing. “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now, Wanda.”

Another stretch of silence came between them, which Wanda ended by saying: “You were arguing about _me_ , weren’t you?”

“Not—not entirely,” Stephen admitted. 

On her end of the line, a door closed, and the ambient noise of voices was gone. She replaced it with a sigh of her own. “Thank you for standing up for me, Stephen,” she said, “but you didn’t need to do that. Whatever peace we’d had after Thanos… I feel like we’ve lost it.”

“If all it took to break it were a few words from a wizard, maybe that peace was never there in the first place,” Stephen told her, and he found that he’d wandered into his own room from the hall. He took a seat on the edge of his bed—the picture that Tony had made him pose for in the restaurant was on the side table, two ecstatic smiles staring back at him from behind glass. “Or at least since it was fractured in Germany.”

“It wasn’t as bad as it seems now, you know,” Wanda said, quietly, and Stephen could hear the wistful smile in her voice. “When it was all of us, when Vision was here. We even used to smile at each other.”

Stephen tried very hard not to look at Tony’s smile looking up at him from the side table. “What happened? I’ve read the files, but I’m sure that there’s more to it than can fit on a legal sized piece of paper.”

“You didn’t ask him?” Wanda asked, her voice incredulous.

He shook his head, realized she couldn’t see him. “No.” 

He’d thought about asking hundreds of times, but none of them had felt like the right time. He knew the gist, of course—the entire country knew the gist of the breakup of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (and a few of the countries they’d taken their breakup to along the way). How could he ask about the way Tony’s smile dropped off his face when Steve entered the room, or the way any time the subject even attempted to rear its head the topic of conversation shifted very abruptly?

“What happened?” Stephen asked again.

So she told him. They spoke for nearly an hour uninterrupted, about the war that tore the Avengers apart. How, from the moment she had accidentally lost control in Lagos, the cracks had begun to form in the foundation they had all built together. The Accords were the wedge, pride was the hammer. 

Her accounts of Siberia were second hand, but she spoke with a sad confidence that told him she’d checked her sources. Wanda couldn’t claim to know if there was even a right or a wrong to the situation, but that it hardly mattered now. The damage was done, and where a friendship that had held the Avengers together had once stood, there was only a dropped shield and a shattered suit. And now, of those that had stood with Tony on the tarmac, only Rhodes was left to stand by his side at the Compound—Natasha had switched sides, King T’Challa had a country to run, Peter was out swinging around Queens, and Vision…

And Stephen realized just what he’d done. After Germany, after the Avengers had split in a very violent way, Tony had been alone. After Thanos had snapped his fingers, as he and Peter and the Guardians faded to dust, Tony was _alone_. And Stephen had _promised_. Told him that he would never be alone again. He’d just _left_ , just walked away like a complete asshole. If he’d been closer to a wall, he might have slammed his head against it.

Wong was right. He _was_ an idiot.

“You said he locked himself in the lab?” Stephen asked, sliding his sling ring on.

“I—I did,” Wanda said, just the smallest stutter in her cadence.

“Thank you for calling me, Wanda,” Stephen said, “but I’ll need to call you back.”

He hung up—rather brusque, he realized, but there was a panic setting into him now. How could he have just _walked away_ like that? He wasn’t some emotionally-stunted teenager, he was a man that had made (and now broken) a promise. If he was lucky, Tony would let him talk, let him apologize. 

Stephen stepped through the portal and into the lab at the Avenger’s Compound. 

The lights were off, the equipment silent but for the fans and the ticking cycle of background processes. Stephen shut the portal behind him, squinting into the darkness.

“Tony?” he asked once. 

He held up a hand, snapped his fingers, and a small light appeared at his fingertips.

His light fell across the pale, worried face of Wanda Maxmioff.

Stephen took a sharp breath, but didn’t jump. They both breathed into the silence. There was no one else in the room with them. Wanda’s phone was still in her hand.

Something was wrong. 

“Wanda,” Stephen said in greeting, though not as amiable as the last time they’d spoken.

“Hello, Stephen,” she said quietly (nervously).

He took a short breath. “You said Tony was in the lab.”

“I wanted you to come to the lab,” she told him plainly. She took one step forward, and Stephen took one quickly backward. “I want to talk, and—I want to show you something.”

Before Stephen could get a handle on what she was saying, Wanda pocketed her phone and threw her hands into an all-too-familiar configuration. He tried to rush forward, stop her hands, but he was a step too far—it was all he could do to throw up a shield. 

With a physical jolt, Wanda slammed the Mirror Dimension into existence around them.

Stephen peered over his shield at their new surroundings (still shaking from the shock of it). He furrowed his brows, looking directly at her proud, but not smug, features. 

“What are you doing?” he asked, narrowed his eyes at her.

“I wanted to show you what I can do,” Wanda said, something defensive in her stance, in the briefest hesitation before she answered. “I’m a quick learner,” she added.

But why the Mirror Dimension? Stephen considered it carefully in the spare moments after her answer. She’d seen him create shields, weapons—any varied number of gestures over the weeks he’d been coming to the Compound she could have copied to show her progress. But—

Oh no.

Something went cold in the middle of Stephen’s chest, and it spiked outward into his limbs and his heart. He sucked in a breath, straightened his spine.

“You didn’t ask me here to make up with Tony, you brought me here to _use_ me.”

Wanda held up her hand between them, a calming gesture. “No, no, it’s not as malicious as you think, I promise. I just want your help.”

“I’ve heard that,” he breathed, trying to ignore the painful prick of disappointment in the back of his throat.

She saw that disappointment. Saw it, faltered for just a second, and then buckled down.

“Please,” she said. Barely held back something desperate. “ _Please_ , just listen. We can do this together—”

“I don’t have to listen,” he snapped. “I know exactly what you’re thinking, Wanda, and the answer is _absolutely not_.” He took a long, steady breath. “You can conjure the Mirror Dimension, but you still need my sling ring to get out. We have three options. One, we forget this ever happened and we both walk out of here _right now_. Two, I refuse to help you and you refuse to leave peacefully, so I leave you in here. Three, you take the sling ring off me and leave _me_ in here. Let’s take option one, shall we?”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said, her voice shuddering just so slightly. 

“But you will?” Stephen added, a sad little smirk flicking to his lips. “All right, we’re done here. Either you’re coming, or we’re going to have a disagreement. And I’ve had a—” Stephen laughed bitterly, dry and angry. “A _really bad_ day. So neither of us is going to like what happens next if we don’t go with option one.”

The next second felt like it lasted for long, agonizing minutes. They started each other down, neither making the first move. Not yet.

Stephen was fast. But Wanda was faster. As he raised his hand to form the portal under her feet, her hand shot out to freeze the movement of his hand with an ethereal, scarlet tether. Stephen grimaced, tried to pull his hand free, only to find the strength of her magical grip as hard as if his fingers had been shoved into quick-drying cement.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she told him quietly. “Please, Stephen. Just—”

“Was all of this just a con?” Stephen snapped, frustration red in his face. “Let’s be honest, Wanda, because I put myself in your ring and I’d like to know if it was over a lie.”

“I never lied!” Wanda countered. Her next breath stuttered through her, tripping over the tightness in her throat. “I came to you because I wanted your help.”

“To steal the Infinity Gauntlet!” Stephen growled.

“Not at first!” She dropped her eyes, looking anywhere but at him—but in the Mirror Dimension, the shards of their reality reflected his bitterness and disappointment. “I really wanted your help, Stephen. I wanted to learn, I wanted control. But the first time you brought us _here_...” She looked up, found the myriad slices of Stephen’s glare following her, and finally faced the man himself. “I knew what I had to do.”

It didn’t change the fact that she had ultimately tricked him into the Mirror Dimension, or what she planned to do here. But the fact that she hadn’t planned it from the beginning softened the blow. A bit. 

“You don’t _have_ to do this, Wanda,” he said.

“Don’t I?” She laughed, almost as forced and bitter as he had. “It’s _my_ fault that Viz is dead, that Thanos got all of the stones.”

The resistance against her power bled out of him, and he stared at her in disbelief. Shook his head, the reverberations of her words fluttering around his head, tapping at him like moths at a lightbulb.

“What? You can’t possibly think—” He tried to approach her thoughts from a different angle. “If it’s your fault that he was able to collect the mind stone, then it’s _my_ fault that he got the time stone. I’m as much to blame as you are.”

“I can’t blame you, Stephen,” she said, and there was a strange conviction in her voice. “But I _can_ blame myself.”

“You’re smarter than that,” Stephen chided angrily. “Thanos—”

“You don’t know me as well as you think,” she shot back. “If I’d been stronger, I could have destroyed the stone before Thanos even got to Earth. So that’s on _me_ ,” she said through clenched teeth, pointed harshly at her own chest. “But I can do something this time. Vision is in there. I can still save him.”

“You don’t know that. And even if he was,” Stephen tried to talk her down, “he might not be who you remember when he came out. Wanda,” and his voice dropped into something darker. “You’re my friend. So you know I can’t let you.”

Her fists clenched at her side. She tried to keep her breathing even, and wasn’t particularly succeeding.

“You would do it for him,” she growled. Her head snapped up, tears building in her scarlet eyes. “You would do it for Stark!” she shouted, echoing harshly around them.

“ _No I wouldn’t_!” Stephen shouted back, his echoes battling with hers, pinging around their heads in the silence he’d slammed into her chest. Stephen caught his own breath, hadn’t realized that he’d lost it in the first place. “That you’d even _consider_ that I would throw the universe under the bus for my own selfish reasons tells me you’re the one that doesn’t know _me_!”

Of course there had been _something_ selfish in giving up the time stone for Tony’s life, but that hadn’t been all there was to it—the part where it was literally the only way to save the universe had certainly helped.

Wanda seemed to read him so easily, but she let it slide off of her with a sad little shake of her head. Stephen felt the tether holding his hand still go even tighter, and she reeled him in like a fish.

“So I’ll do it alone,” she said, those tears tracking down her face. “I’ll bring him back. I’ll—” She sucked in a breath, wiped at her eye, and caught a sob before it caught her. “I’m so sorry, Stephen.”

And he suddenly felt like he’d been hit over the head with a city bus. His vision went white, and he felt the ground rushing up to meet him, and then nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things finally happen! I've had most of this written/planned since basically the beginning, it's good to finally get it out. And since I think people may have questions about Wanda's motivations and intentions, I still believe her to be a sympathetic character, albeit with flaws (like ALL of our heroes). And, of course, more will come out with more chapters, so sorry for the cliffhanger!  
> also it's my birthday :3


	8. projection exhaustion

Stephen woke with one of the more memorable headaches of his life, but not nearly the worst he could remember. Before he even began to assess his situation, he patted himself down in a quick search. The sling ring was gone.

He was trapped in the Mirror Dimension.

He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose from his position flat on his back, squeezed his eyes shut against the nausea of his headache. He pushed through it, struggled to his feet, and took off in the direction of Tony’s office. He streaked past Clint, who was running in the opposite direction—if they had existed in the same dimension, they would have slammed into each others’ shoulders.

Stephen had the most threadbare plan forming as he moved through the Mirror Dimension version of the Compound. Find Tony, find a way to contact him, use his algorithm to locate the stones, and convince Wanda to hand them over. A tall order, considering that Stephen didn’t know exactly how he was going to execute step two. 

Tony was in his office. He was pacing with an intense, pinched expression on his face. The music that he had blaring was muffled as if through water. 

For a moment, Stephen forgot all about being trapped, all about the theft, and felt his heart twist in his chest. He’d done that. He’d put that bitter sadness in Tony’s eyes, all those lines in Tony’s forehead. 

He collected his thoughts with a long inhale, tore his eyes away from Tony.

The Infinity Gauntlet was gone. The corner of the office in the Mirror Dimension had been previously occupied by the containment unit Tony had mocked up after their final battle with Thanos, with the gauntlet stored inside for safekeeping until such time that they discovered how to rid the universe of the stones. The unit stood empty, the lock still smoking and arcane energy sparking off of the broken spells.

Stephen palmed his face, shoulders sagging with a long and drawn-out growl. How could he let this happen? He’d let down his defenses, and she’d used that trust against him. Even if it hadn’t been her plan from the beginning, she’d still gone through with it.

But he couldn’t hate her, despite everything. There were no excuses for what she’d done, what she planned on doing, but he still didn’t despise her. Maybe Stephen Strange had gone soft, but he had to believe that there was a way to fix this.

Well, that was step one. On to step two. 

Stephen turned his back on the empty containment unit and took a seat on the ground—legs folded, and his arms perched on his knees. He had used the Mirror Dimension countless times, and he had also projected his astral body outside of himself on a good number of occasions. But he had never had the need to do both at the same time. He didn’t even know if it was possible to project oneself through the barrier between dimensions.

Wong probably had a book on it somewhere, Stephen thought with a listless chuckle.

He closed his eyes, took a long breath to fill his lungs, and held it there for five seconds. On the fifth, Stephen threw his astral body free of his physical body, like a spirit floating aimlessly in the empty space of the Mirror Dimension. He glanced briefly down at himself, shrugged, and just went for it.

As he did when using the sling ring, Stephen fixed the image of where he wanted to be into his mind. But instead of conjuring a doorway to easily step through into another place, Stephen had to claw his way through the barrier that separated this reality from the one where Tony was pacing furiously in his office. Space didn’t fold away for him, he had to make it bend around him—force his astral body from one dimension into another.

If he’d had breath in this form, he would have lost all of it when he slammed into the reality of Tony’s office. And Stephen realized he still had work to do. As he had with Christine in the operating room, he pulled himself even further through the veil. Out of the astral realm of the material plane to manifest, spectral and floating, in the real world.

How could an astral body be exhausted?

“Tony,” his voice echoed even in his lungs, forced its way through into this dimension.

Tony jumped, whirled around at the sound of Stephen’s voice, and froze. Like someone had slapped him hard in the face, his chest heaving with short, scared little breaths. His eyes (too wide) darted up and down Stephen’s ghostly-looking apparition, worry mounting in his entire frame.

“What the hell?” Tony breathed, barely managed to vocalize around what sounded like terror. He surged forward, but stopped just short of touching him. “Oh my _god_ , are you—”

“I’m okay,” Stephen said, held a hand up to stop him. “This is a projection of my astral body,” he assured Tony, whose open face was cycling through too many emotions to count. He picked one (concern) and stared.

“Okay,” Tony said breathlessly, visibly swallowed. “Yeah, okay. Sure. But your _body_ body, it’s—?”

“Safe,” Stephen told him. He’d readied an explanation of getting trapped in the Mirror Dimension and the beginnings of a plan to get him out, but different words bullied their way out of his mouth before he had the chance. 

“Tony. I’m so sorry.”

He hated the way his voice sounded, they way it caught on something on the way out of him. The way he had to swallow that something back down before it made him say anything too stupid.

Tony’s shoulders dropped, and it was something more soft and vulnerable that took the place of the nervousness in his stance. Something hurt, something caring. He let out a breath as if he’d been holding it since Stephen left, slow and shuddering. Tony wasn’t saying anything, he was just looking at him. 

“I shouldn’t have—” Stephen’s voice actively fought against him. “I promised that—”

Thankfully, Tony stopped him with a tiny wave of his hand.

“We’ll argue later, I promise,” Tony said, his snark managing to poke holes in his anxiety. But his words came more easily, not stifled anymore. “You’re not hurt?”

“Just stuck,” Stephen sighed.

“Stuck _where_?” Tony asked.

“The Mirror Dimension,” Stephen finally admitted.

Tony blinked at him, and there were suddenly a million thoughts running behind his eyes; quick calculations matching the quick movement of his eyes. The realization struck him violently, and he actually took a step back from the blow.

“The gauntlet?” Tony asked quickly, practically jumping out of his skin. 

“Gone.”

“God _dammit_.” Tony threaded his fingers nervously through his hair, turned and found the same trough he’d been pacing before. “How—? _Who_ —?”

And Tony was smart. It only took him five seconds to realize exactly who, and he came to a dead halt. His spine went rigid, and hands balled into hard fists. He turned, and his face had gone pale. Stephen saw his throat bob and his mouth press into a painful line.

“Wanda,” Tony said, and her name was like a stone. When Stephen didn’t deny it, Tony’s mouth pulled back into a grimace—a snarl. “She got your sling ring?”

Stephen nodded, tight-lipped under that scrutiny.

Tony threw up his arms. “She could be anywhere! She—”

He stopped, mouth half-open. His eyes searched Stephen, eyebrows bending up into a sudden, hard distress—raised a hand like he was going to try again to touch him, but faltered at the last inch.

“Stephen, did she hurt you?” Tony’s voice—something usually so upbeat, jovial, easy, kind—turned suddenly dark and terrible, wavered at the end with a pained bob of his throat. That flare of protective instinct sat very starkly on Tony’s expressive face, his breath striking him almost painfully.

If he’d been tangible, Stephen would have grabbed Tony and kissed the hell out of him.

“She’s scared,” he said instead. 

“Bull _shit_ ,” Tony snapped, puffing up, ready for a fight that hadn’t yet presented itself.

“Tony,” Stephen said softly, even through the searing anger (the heavy concern) in Tony’s glance. “If you were in her shoes, what would you do? If you thought that this was the only way you could save Peter.” There was the briefest pause, where Tony’s eyes flicked away (guilt still heavy in his brow). “There’s still a chance we can stop her, if we find her before she uses the gauntlet. If she’d wanted to really hurt me, she could have.”

“Are you saying she’s not a threat?” Tony asked, incredulous. “I had that thing on my arm, Stephen. I know what it feels like—as soon as I put it on, I felt like I could do anything. Like I could tear the universe apart and put it back the way I wanted to. She could hand me my ass on a normal day, so she’s gotta be goddamn _nuclear_ with that rock collection.”

Stephen sighed, a noise that sounded like a breeze through a far away open window, echoing through dimensions. “Okay. The stones are a threat, and she has the stones. But we can’t bring the full force of the Avengers bearing down on her. I should go— _we_ should go.”

A little sad bark of a laugh left Tony’s frame. “She could be roided up on evil cosmic jewelry and you want us to go in _alone_? No offence, but I think she could take you, sweetheart.”

“If we rope everyone into this, it will look like everyone’s turned against her,” Stephen said, moving like a ghost about the office in thought. “Put her even more on the defensive than she already is. There’s no hope of talking her out of this if all of the Avengers are against her.”

Tony waved a hand, shook his head. “Wait, okay, priority number one is getting you out of the Mirror Dimension. How do I do it?”

And Stephen found himself staring. How could he _possibly_ be priority number one? Wanda Maxmioff had stolen the Infinity Stones, the most powerful weapons in the universe, and was off to parts unknown to find a way to bring Vision back to life.

Tony stared right back, his face pinching in confusion to mirror Stephen’s expression. As if to say _of course you’re top priority_.

He could feel his heart skip a beat, even in his astral form.

Then again, that could have had something to do with the sudden weakness he felt spreading all through his projection. It was an odd thing, to feel yourself flicker. Stephen looked at his hands, saw the projection of himself dimming—like a screen that was losing power, shutting down.

“Tones,” Stephen breathed, his eyes flicking back up—maybe a little more desperate than he had meant to sound.

“Stephen, hey,” Tony called, immediately rushing up to him. Tried to get some kind of hold on him, support him, only to find his arms sliding right through him. “Stephen, tell me what to do!”

Stephen snapped up, shaking and cold, from the floor. Words caught in his throat, and came out as a pained little groan. He and his astral body had been violently reunited, and he wondered for a long, agonizing moment if he was going to throw up. He swallowed slow gulps of air and sat up from the floor to see how he’d left the world.

Outside the Mirror Dimension, Tony had frozen to the spot where Stephen disappeared—arms still outstretched as he’d tried to catch him. Panic seized Tony’s entire body, and he made a frantic movement to search the room. Called out, the sound of his voice dulled by the distance.

Stephen caught his breath, closed his eyes and tried to still the swimming in his head.

He threw his astral form once again outward, prying through the layers of realities until he managed to appear again in the material world.

“Jesus—” Tony breathed, jumping again at his sudden appearance. “What’s happening? Tell me what’s wrong,” he said firmly, almost too quickly.

“I’m—I’m okay,” Stephen tried to reassure him, but that wave of nausea hit him again. “Never tried to project myself between dimensions before. Harder than I thought. Don’t have time for practice, but I’ll get better. That and… being knocked out.” He waved vaguely at the door. “Tracking program you used to find the stones. We’ll find her, and we’ll get her back. I love you.”

It felt _so good_ to say it again, even if he had to bully it out of where it had been cowering in his throat. Some part of him relaxed, the part of him that wasn’t trying to sustain his projection through the wall between dimensions.

“Stephen—” Tony said. And his words were cut off as Stephen blinked back into his body, trapped in the Mirror Dimension and looking up at Tony from the floor of his office. 

Tony’s jaw worked uselessly, the fingers flexing on his hand and his eyes stuck on empty air. “I—”

“Oh, just go,” Stephen said as if Tony could still hear him, his voice echoing uselessly.

“Right,” Tony said out loud to no one, righted himself (still looking around as if Stephen would appear at any moment). “Tracking program, I’m going.”

Stephen lay back on the floor, catching his breath as he closed his eyes against the waves of discomfort and exhaustion, an arm over his eyes to block out the spinning of the thousands of shards circling around him. He heard Tony rush out of the office, heard the dim echoing of noise in the hall through the open door.

It had been a very long time since a spell had taken it out of him like this. Since Titan, since throwing his mind hurtling into millions of possible futures. This wasn’t so bad, he thought vaguely. Comparatively. A loose chuckle wracked his frame, and it broke into a bout of laughter that he had absolutely no control over. The sound of his own laugh bounced back at him a hundred times over, which only made the situation more ridiculous.

Trapped in a literal house of mirrors, the gauntlet stolen and in the wind, his relationship and new friendship both possibly on the line—and all he could do was laugh. Call it a coping mechanism, Stephen told himself, and get over it. Hilarity aside, he had work to do.

With that out of his system, Stephen pulled himself to his feet and followed Tony out the door.


	9. rushed

Tony was in the lab, the lights kept dim as though for an air of subterfuge. He was alone, already leaning over the nearest computer—quick fingers dashing from keyboard to keyboard.

Stephen appeared in Tony’s line of sight this time, but even with that precaution, he still managed to make Tony jump.

“Sorry,” Stephen breathed.

Tony let out a long sigh. “We gotta stop meeting like this,” he said—almost playful, and might have been if the situation wasn’t so dire. “But I’m starting to think it comes with the territory.”

“Boyfriend territory?” Stephen murmured, hovering close.

Tony scoffed. “Avengers territory. Bullshit cosmic powers territory.” He turned away from Stephen, punching something into the phone in one of his hands. “Y’know, when _I_ appeared out of thin air, at least I did it at the same time every day.”

“What are you doing?” Stephen asked, squinting at the phone.

“What d’you mean, what am I doing?” Tony asked, and he tossed a projection of the phone’s screen out into the lab, which stuck in the air just beside Stephen. The screen indicated that Tony was making a call, to a contact he’d listed as _Mother Hen_.

Stephen laughed, despite everything. “Wong?”

“Yeah,” Tony said absently, flicking screen after screen into the air from the console in front of him, suddenly surrounded by a glowing forest that his fingers danced across as the phone rang and rang into the silence. “But he’s not picking up.”

“Ah,” Stephen sighed. “Probably back at Kamar-Taj. I have a feeling Wong isn’t paying for international calling.”

“Okay,” Tony grumbled, pushing his way through a handful of screens to look Stephen in the eye again. “What’s the number for Kamar-Taj?”

“Wh—” Stephen began, a question turning to an exhausted sigh on his tongue.

“Because I’m getting you out of there, Stephen,” Tony cut him off, hard and insistent. “Wong’s got a sling ring, too, and if I gotta charter a fucking flight to Kathmandu to get his ass into the Mirror Dimension, I’m gonna do it. And I’ve got the tracking program booting in the background, so don’t say I’ve got more important things to do.”

The phone rang into the silence between them. There was a weight in Stephen’s chest, and there was nothing he could do to explain it. The physical pain in his astral body was literally impossible, but he still felt it—radiating through dimensions to steal his breath and weigh his insides down.

“Boss,” FRIDAY said over the intercom of the lab, and both of their heads shot up. “Captain Rogers is on his way to the lab, looks on edge.”

“Thanks, FRIDAY,” Tony muttered, and he quickly flung the hovering screens back down onto the physical surface of the computer. He hung up the call with Wong, tucked the phone in a pocket, and whirled back around to Stephen. “If you’re serious about not wanting to get everyone involved in this, you better poof back into the Mirror Dimension while I think of something to get Cap off my back.”

Stephen nodded, his voice still lost in whatever fragments of a moment they’d been having. He wanted to say something, just a parting word, but found that same silence gunking up his inner workings. He nodded one more time, uselessly, and felt his way back to his body in the Mirror Dimension.

Three minutes later, he watched as Steve Rogers came marching into the lab. He flipped the switch nearest the door, and bright fluorescent light washed over Tony as he stood alone in the lab, as casual as could be expected.

“What’s up, Cap?” Tony asked, leaning on the nearest flat surface—coincidentally, where the readout of the tracking program was compiling. 

“Tony, when Strange left, did he take Wanda with him? We can’t find her anywhere.” Steve got straight to the point. And Stephen could tell that he was worried—his stance, normally confident, made him look practically small in comparison; no eye contact, shifting his weight.

“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Tony grumbled, picking at something under a fingernail in a supreme show of disinterest. “She’s an adult, I don’t have to keep an eye on her twenty-four-seven. Neither do _you_ , actually.” His eyes shot up, fixed Steve with a glare. 

Steve sighed, hung his head. “I didn’t come here to fight.”

“Then how come you only visit when you’ve got nothing nice to say?” Tony shoved himself up off the console, if only to appear that much taller. 

“I know you and Stephen had an argument,” Steve cut in, and he finally looked up. Not with a challenge, but not completely passive, either. “And I know he left pretty quickly, Tony.”

“That’s none of your business,” Tony said very quickly. “And, really, doesn’t have anything to do with Wanda, so let’s _not_ talk about it, okay?”

“Look,” Steve said, crossed his arms and stared Tony down. “I like Stephen, I really do. I think having him around has made all of this a little easier on everyone. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about him. I want to trust him—I want to trust _you_. But I still don’t know how you met, when you…” Steve pinched the bridge of his nose in thought; as if the upcoming question made him supremely uncomfortable, he shifted his weight again, but didn’t back down. “You didn’t… didn’t cheat on Pepper, did you?”

“What?!” Tony practically exploded—and the tone in his voice sent a chill right through Stephen, even across the dimensions. “Are you _serious_? You came down here to ask about Wanda and now I’m getting _interrogated_ about my relationship? Y’know what, _no_. I’m not having this conversation with you.” He waved Steve off, turned away and disengaged. 

“I’m trying, Tony!” Steve said to his back.

“Like hell you are!” Tony rounded back on him. “ _Trying_ isn’t using an excuse to ask me if I _cheated on Pepper._ And I didn’t, by the way. I was close, but you know who stopped me? _He_ did.”

Steve opened his mouth, but Tony cut him off with a hand slicing through the air, and a sharp noise from between clenched teeth.

“I know you and I still have a lot of shit to work through,” Tony said firmly. “The things is, I don’t need you to think that I’m a great guy—because maybe I’m _not_. But _he_ is.”

Tony caught his breath, stood tall against the strange expression on Steve’s face, and then motioned for the door. “You’re excused, Captain,” he prompted. 

“Tony, I just—” But Steve closed his own mouth, shut himself up. He nodded, sighed, and turned. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything about Wanda.”

“You do that,” Tony grumbled, returning to the computer and turning his back on Captain America.

He was a Master of the Mystic Arts, Stephen tried to tell himself as he watched them part. He was a sorcerer, well-versed in spells—a channeler of great dimensional energy, a man of arcane knowledge and power. But looking at the tension like piano wire pulled taut in all of Tony’s muscles made him feel powerless; made him feel like just _a man_. Who was _he_ to ask so much of _Tony Stark_? How dare he contribute to the weight already on Tony’s shoulders?

Stephen came back into the real world, and brought the uneasy, churning feeling that hadn’t left his stomach since Tony had raised his voice. That feeling formed into words against his will, forced themselves into his throat and fell out of him of their own accord.

“Do you love me, Tony?” That voice felt too alien and small to be his own. Too sad, too meek; not like Stephen Strange at all.

For his part, Tony looked like he’d just taken a punch to the face—almost staggered from the hit, his entire face reeling up in confusion and indignation.

“What kind of question is that?” Tony asked, incredulity dripping off of him. His jaw moved wordlessly for a handful of syllables, gathering his thoughts. And a sudden finger jabbed in Stephen’s direction. “Wait, is _that_ what your whole silent treatment was about? So, what, you can finally _talk_ to me when you’re not physically in the same dimension?”

It all came rushing out of Stephen too quickly—everything he’d built up against the words and the feelings over the past week came crashing down at once, and he was talking almost too fast for his brain to keep up.

“It’s only that you’ve never said—I don’t know how I’m supposed to know if you haven’t said—I’ve told you a hundred times, and you—” 

Something like a laugh (too painful to be a laugh) interrupted the stream of words, and Stephen practically slammed his face into his hand (could imagine the embarrassed and worried heat that would be overtaking his physical body if he’d been present). 

“ _God_ , we rushed into all of this, didn’t we?” Stephen’s voice choked, couldn’t look Tony in the eye. “You’re jealous, I’m paranoid, we—”

“Stephen Strange,” Tony interrupted, strong-arming his way back into the conversation. “I swear, if you were corporeal right now, I’d slap you.”

It was enough to strangle Stephen’s rush of terrible words, but he could still feel them fluttering in the back of his throat like trapped butterflies. Felt them trying to flee with every breath. His timing was pitiful, he thought vaguely. Especially when his heart beat too quickly, and he was suddenly back in the Mirror Dimension. Stephen uttered a hard curse, which bounced harshly around him. He had to get back out there, regardless of the strain it put on him—he had to say this, he had to finally _say something_ now that his lips were letting him. He couldn’t leave Tony, not with all of this tension and anxiety finally coming to a head.

When he yanked his astral body back into Tony’s reality, Stephen nearly stumbled right through him. Tony gave a tight little shout, tried to grab for him only once before he realized that he couldn’t—and Stephen righted himself, sluggish and slow, hovering inches above the floor with a haggard sigh.

“Stephen, slow down,” Tony barked, running both hands back through his hair in lieu of being able to help. “You’re gonna hurt yourself, just—”

“No, Tony, I was an idiot—I _am_ an idiot,” Stephen pushed (how could an astral form have something caught in its throat?). “Stupid, selfish—” He spoke over whatever Tony was trying to interject. “I shouldn’t be romantically involved, it always,” Stephen raised his voice over Tony’s, “ _always_ ends up like this—”

“Stephen!” Tony finally managed to shout, gaining the upper hand. “Baby, can you stop talking for _one_ second?”

And, at last, both of them were silent. For one long, blessed moment, neither one of them said a word. Tony held up both of his hands in front of him—a calming motion, a surrender.

“God, okay,” he sighed breathlessly, gathering himself and all of his thoughts. “Once you get going, you don’t really stop, do you?” 

It was an attempt at diffusing the tension, and while neither of them laughed, both of them let out any of the breath they’d been holding in; Stephen practically deflated—still a bundle of unsure nerves, but not babbling uselessly anymore.

“You know me—I rush into everything,” Tony said, his diction more careful than usual. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but cautious isn’t one of them. But… if you think we’re rushing, then we’ll slow down.”

“It’s not about—” Stephen cut himself off this time. “It’s not about what I want,” he managed the second time, with a little more strength in his voice.

And Tony’s face broke, a little smile shining through all the worry and the trepidation. He stepped right up to Stephen’s projection, his hands hovering just shy of passing right through him—like he wanted to touch Stephen so badly, knew he couldn’t and hated it.

“It is a _little_ bit,” Tony said, eyes searching in their closeness. “This isn’t the fate of the universe we’re talking about, it’s a relationship. This is a two-way street. We gotta do this together.”

“I know,” Stephen breathed, his whole body sagging under that gaze. “I know, I’m sorry—”

“And stop apologizing,” Tony murmured. “Stephen, of course I love you.” His voice was softer than Stephen was sure he’d ever heard it, quiet and close. “And, hey, maybe I didn’t know it when I was dancing to Cyndi Lauper—” An absolutely devastatingly snarky look flashed in Tony’s eyes at the sudden, pale shock all over Stephen’s face. “—but I sure as hell know it now. And I’m never gonna let you forget that I love you, Stephen Strange.”

Just like that, just with a few words, all of the uneasiness—the anxiety and the paranoia—literally rolled off of Stephen in a wave. A soft laugh came out of him like a sigh, breathy and just a little bit sad. Tears clawed at the back of his throat, but he denied them with a shake of his head. He wanted to _be there_ , wanted to take Tony’s face in his hands, wanted to kiss everything he could get his mouth on. And when Tony saw that look, when a knowing smirk twisted onto Tony’s lips, another bout of painful laughter wracked through Stephen’s astral body.

“I thought you were asleep,” Stephen said, his voice small but not frightened (not anymore).

“I know you did,” Tony replied. “I think that’s what the kids are calling _irony_.” His eyes softened, just a little, just enough for Stephen to notice. “I really never told you—?”

Stephen shook his head, a smile splitting his own face. “Pretty sure I’d remember that.”

A small noise from one of the screens around them pulled both of their attention away from one another—a flashing light all the indication that the tracking program had been running at all. It had booted and was awaiting input, as far as Stephen could tell. Tony turned immediately to the screen and started working.

And Stephen had to admit, even in these dire straits, he loved to watch Tony work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, I had something like this in the notes of the first story in this series, but I think it bears repeating. I'm not anti-Steve, I'm not anti-Wanda, and while they have flaws, so does literally everyone else. Actions have consequences, and characters have to come to terms with them. That doesn't mean I'm going to sit here and write a lecture that bashes them. There are plenty of other fics out there that do just that, if that's what you're looking for. That's not what this story is about. This series is about love, and healing, and learning.   
> Sorry about the mini-rant, and thank you for sticking with me <3


	10. processing

It didn’t take long for Tony to start complaining.

“Wish you were another pair of hands and not just a pretty face,” Tony murmured over his shoulder, flicking one of the screens away—it hit a wall and faded to black. “It’s usually me and Bruce running the program together. The amount of data this thing compiles is completely ridiculous—it’s got processes for its processes.”

“Ah,” Stephen said, not understanding at all. Instead, he latched onto: “Bruce.”

“Oh, look who’s Doctor Jealous, now,” Tony snorted. He waved at a screen that had bounced across the room and landed out of arm’s reach. “You really can’t touch anything?”

“You don’t think I would have by now?” Stephen murmured, and Tony had to look away from the way Stephen’s eyes fixed on him. “And I’m not jealous,” Stephen reeled up in denial, “I’m—”

“Projecting,” Tony supplied, and he spun away from one of the readouts—flashing in a way that seemed alarming to Stephen but didn’t seem to phase Tony. “I mean—I guess, literally and figuratively. God, this is weird.” He narrowed his eyes at Stephen through the holographic display. “How come as soon as you’re see-through I can get you to talk to me for more than five seconds?”

“There’s just something about dire situations that brings out the conversationalist in me,” Stephen said dryly.

“ _There’s_ the jerk I fell in love with.” A smirk cracked sideways over Tony’s mouth. “How can you even blush right now?”

Stephen hadn’t even realized he had been, and instead of trying to wrap their brain power around the phenomena, he ignored it in favor of the issue at hand.

“You’re the smartest man I know, why would you need Banner’s help to run the program?”

“Well, running the program isn’t the problem,” Tony began, not interrupting the work of his fingers on the holographic displays in front of him. “I can do a lot of things by myself. It’s just easier with two.”

“Now you’re _trying_ to make me blush,” Stephen murmured, trying to hide a smile and failing.

“To be fair, you don’t know how good you look when you’re blushing.”

“Tones,” Stephen breathed, an exasperated laugh, “as much as I love our playful banter, we’ve got to track those stones down as quickly as—”

“I’m on it, sweetheart,” Tony said, tapping the screen twice to illuminate his work more plainly. 

It was a layout of the Compound, which he then blew wide to take up the majority of the far wall. With a flick of Tony’s wrist, the image zoomed out, and continued zooming out. New York State, the eastern seaboard, North America—until a skeletal blueprint of the Earth was on display in front of them. Tony pulled up another screen, poking and prodding at it, adjusting sliders and a handful of other processes that Stephen didn’t catch or quite grasp.

“There’s equipment all over the planet,” Tony began to explain, “ah—weather stations, military radar, anything that’ll pick up surges in energy or—”

“You’ve programmed them to sweep for the signature let off by the stones,” Stephen finished for him. “I’m not a genius, but I’m not completely lost.”

Tony smirked, then returned to one of the many smaller readouts he’d pulled up around them. “Right. But there’s a lot of fine-tuning involved, and another pair of hands would really speed up the process.”

“I hate to interrupt, Boss,” came the voice of FRIDAY once again, “but I’ve picked up Peter Parker on the premises. Should I also keep him out of the lab?”

Tony tipped his head back, squeezed his eyes shut, and sighed at the heavens. “’Cause you did such a good job with Cap. No,” he groaned, “he’d find a way in anyway. You wanna duck out again, sweetheart?” He asked this to Stephen, a weary look furrowing into his brow.

“No. But I should.” The apparition of his fingers brushed through Tony’s hair, and a shiver took hold of Tony’s entire body. “The fewer people that know I’m incapacitated, the better.”

Tony nodded, and with that Stephen found himself back in his body. His breath was shorter than the last time he returned, and there was a new ache that spread into his limbs. Like he’d just run a straight four miles, dehydrated and weak. He pulled himself to his feet, regretted the movement, and sat quickly back down on the floor of the lab—tipped his head up to force more air into his lungs. 

This wasn’t big magic, he felt that it shouldn’t be this taxing on him. He’d forced his mind barreling through millions of possible timelines, this should have been a piece of literal cake. But, then again, he’d had the time stone for that. This was forcing a projection of his astral self through the actual, physical barrier between dimensions. He sighed, closed his eyes against the ache in his limbs. The Sorcerer Supreme wouldn’t have this hard a time; the Ancient One could probably have done big magic in her sleep.

But he wasn’t the Sorcerer Supreme. Not yet.

“Tell the kid I’m in the lab,” Tony instructed FRIDAY, who answered in the affirmative. “It’s kinda creepy, by the way,” he said out loud. “Watching me from the Mirror Dimension. Don’t know if I like it or not, yet.”

Stephen laughed listlessly. “Tony,” he sighed, even knowing he couldn’t hear him.

Minutes later, Peter Parker appeared in the doorway of the lab, looking like he’d run directly from school all the way to the Compound. Windswept and worried, standing awkwardly and unnoticed.

“Hey—er, hi, Mister Stark. Your lady said I could come down here…?”

“Hey kid,” Tony said as casually as possible. “Just stop by to hang out in doorways? Come on.” He made a wide motion to invite Peter into the lab.

“Um,” Peter began, slinging his backpack into a rolling desk chair and watching it fly away from him at the impact for just a moment before he began again. “I was actually making sure everything’s okay with Mister Strange. He wasn’t at the Sanctum, and Mister Wong wasn’t either, and he’s usually here if he’s not there, but—” He cleared his throat, tried to look taller somehow. “Is he—is he here?”

“He’s…” Tony drew out the word in a way that was completely non-surreptitious. “Definitely here.”

Stephen smiled from the Mirror Dimension, felt a small laugh trapped in his chest despite everything. They were all such terrible liars.

“Is he okay? I mean, not like it’s my job to make sure he’s okay, but…”

Tony sighed, finally turned and looked Peter in the eye. An exasperated smirk sat on his face. “He’s still in bed, he’s fine. Are _you_ okay?”

“Yeah,” Peter sighed, slumping out of whatever anxious posture he’d made for himself. “I dunno, he said it’s really important that the Sanctum’s guarded, and no one was there, so I was worried, yeah, but…” He rubbed both of his hands over his face. “Sorry, I’ll just—”

“No, hold on,” Tony insisted, took a step toward the boy. “C’mere, Pete, I can use an extra set of hands. That control panel over there by the desk—”

“Oh, yeah?” Peter said, and he hopped into a rolling chair, scooting it across the floor of the lab—eager to put the embarrassing episode behind him. He gently cradled the holographic panel, and once he seemed to grasp the concept, he tossed it from hand to hand. “Tracking program, cool. What’re you looking for, Mister Stark?”

“Very specific energy signature,” Tony supplied, and he shot another screen across the lab at Peter. “There’s the specs, configure that array for the spectrum—”

“I know how to read,” Peter murmured, adjusting the levels on the display. 

The map Tony had projected onto the far wall pulsed for a moment, and then corrected for Peter’s adjustments.

“Gamma levels?” Peter asked, flicking his eyes up at Tony with a hundred more questions in them. “Shouldn’t Doctor Banner be helping you instead?”

“Out sick,” Tony lied, and he shot Peter three more screens. “Those too, kiddo.”

Peter nodded, and once he’d made the adjustments Tony had asked, he opened his mouth again. “Or… I mean, if you need the help, why not get Mister Strange?”

“You know he’s a doctor, too, right?” Tony asked instead, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” Peter grumbled. “I just… I didn’t know that ‘til we were in space, and it’s already stuck in my head, and he never corrected me so—”

They fell into silence, working together almost effortlessly—bouncing from display to display with little instruction. And Stephen found himself watching the two of them work with a proud little smirk on his face. Tony was incredibly smart, there was no way anyone could deny that, but sometimes Stephen found himself forgetting just how intelligent Peter was, too. He’d engineered the web fluid all by himself, before Tony had stepped in with the suits; his grades were astounding, even if his work as Spider-Man interfered from time to time. In so many ways, he was just a boy. But in other ways, he was smarter than Stephen.

It didn’t upset him, not in the slightest. He was _proud_. And that pride in Peter surprised him, but it didn’t shock him. 

“Oh!” Peter said suddenly, and he pushed the chair across the floor to join Tony by the main readout. “I think it’s got something, I’m getting a—”

On cue, a bright dot appeared on the map, eliciting a loud pinging through the entire lab. Tony pulled Peter’s chair along with him, right up to the map with a renewed sense of urgency. Even Stephen managed to make his way over.

Africa. Stephen didn’t even need to see it any closer to know precisely where the gauntlet was.

“Shit,” Tony breathed as he scanned the readout, apparently coming to exactly the same conclusion, his shoulders slumping.

“Wait, where is that?” Peter asked, standing out of the chair to lean in even closer. “Is that…?”

“Wakanda,” Stephen muttered, appearing between them with a sigh. “Should have seen that coming, I suppose.”

Peter reeled back, fell backwards into his chair and rolled five feet away—barely managed to clamp his hands over his mouth to keep in his scream.

“What the fff—” Peter cut himself off from between his fingers, eyes wide and worried. “—freaking heck?” He glanced from Tony (nonplussed, even slightly amused) to Stephen (see-through and annoyed). “Mister Strange?”

“Peter,” Stephen acknowledged.

“You—You’re—Are you—” Peter’s jaw waggled, as if chewing on the half-formed thoughts before they stumbled out of him. “Is this some weird magic stuff, or are you—are you, like, a ghost right now?”

“I’m not dead,” Stephen supplied, quickly changed tack. “Tony, if she’s taken the gauntlet to Wakanda—”

“Wait, the gauntlet?” Peter cut back in, finally out of his daze. “She who? Mister Stark, what exactly’s going on?”

“Long story,” Tony said, and then his face pulled into a weird little grimace. “Well, not really, but I don’t feel like explaining it right now.” He turned back to Stephen. “Cap said that T’Challa’s little sister makes me look like a kid playing with an Erector Set. She had some kinda plan for Vision back before the world went to shit, so maybe—”

“Maybe Wanda never planned to _use_ the gauntlet,” Stephen finished for him. He sighed darkly. “If she’d just _told_ me…”

“And you would’ve listened?” Tony laughed, sarcastic and heavy. “All right, we got a location, it’s just a hop and skip over to the hangar for—”

“I can’t.” 

Stephen’s ethereal voice stopped Tony in his tracks.

“You _can’t_?” 

“It’s trying enough to project myself through the dimensional walls when I’m standing right in front of you,” Stephen supplied—and, true to his words, his form flickered just once with a spasm of pain showing on his face. “I couldn’t project myself all the way to Wakanda, not with the power I have right now.”

“We’ll—” Tony scrounged for ideas, stepping up close. “We’ll get your body in the Quinjet, fly you out with—”

“I’m a Master of the Mystic Arts,” Stephen breathed, “but I still don’t know everything there is to know about dimensional travel. I _do_ know that you’re more than capable without dragging around my astral projection, slowing you down.”

“I can’t just leave you behind!” Tony snapped.

“You’re going to,” Stephen snapped right back. “I’m completely safe here. Time’s already short as it is, we don’t have enough of it to spend wondering if my body in the Mirror Dimension can even interact with the Quinjet at all. We can experiment to your little heart’s content when you and the gauntlet get back, but right now, you need to _go_.”

Tony scoffed, paced away from Stephen at a clip. “She didn’t listen to _you_ , and you’re her new best friend. I’m public enemy number one on her list, how the hell am I supposed to convince her to give it up? I need your help, Stephen.”

“I can go with,” Peter volunteered sheepishly.

Tony rounded on him, almost like he’d forgotten the boy was there.

“Are you kidding?” Tony argued, waving an arm at Peter. “The last thing I wanna do is drag you halfway across the world and get you involved in something that’s got nothing to do with you!”

“You dragged me to Germany,” Peter supplied, a thoughtful finger in the air.

“Don’t you—” Tony cut himself off with agonizing restraint. “That was different,” he volleyed.

“That was just asking a teenager to beat up Captain America,” Peter returned.

Stephen laughed, but swallowed the noise just as quickly as he’d let it out. “Look, whatever you decide to do, you should—” He flickered again, felt like the breath had been knocked out of him somehow. “Just go, Tones,” he managed. “I—”

“I love you too,” Tony cut in too quickly, cursing under his breath (especially at the way Stephen’s grin was bending upward at the corners of his mouth). “God, I gotta work on my timing.”

Stephen blinked, and he was back in the Mirror Dimension. 

“All right,” Tony said, after just one too-long moment left staring at the space where Stephen had been. He rounded on Peter, looking more serious than Stephen had seen him in weeks. “If you seriously wanna get in on this field trip, it’s time to go, kid.”

“What, really?” Peter jumped up out of the chair like it’d been electrified. “You’d take me to _Wakanda_?”

“I took you to space,” Tony sighed, and he shut down all of the displays with a few flicks of his wrists. “Hell, this is a cakewalk compared to space.”

They left the lab together only seconds later. And Stephen was perched on the floor—in the dark, in silence; alone. Realizing for the first time that he was even more alone than he’d realized. No contact with Tony—or anyone—from this point out. Until either Tony returned with the gauntlet or… 

He ignored any of the other terrifying possibilities. Folded himself into the lotus position and steadied his shaking breath. Closed his eyes against the shimmering reflections of his own worried face. And he meditated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay I'm worried again. This'll be the first time ever writing the Wakanda crew. Also, I've very very rarely moved away from over Stephen's shoulder, but I'm gonna have to for splitting the team up, so hopefully I can write over Tony's shoulder just as good. ugh, I know I'm worried for no real reason, but I still worry. Thank you guys for reading so far! <3


	11. misdirection

It had barely been twenty minutes of silence before the door to the lab opened, and one of Stephen’s eyes creaked open. His heart jumped unwillingly into his throat, throttling his brain for just one unguarded moment.

Pepper Potts flipped on the lights to the lab, her eyes sweeping the empty equipment for any signs of life. She had a clipboard in one hand, pressed casually to her hip. She was in much better sorts than the last time Stephen had seen her (tears in her eyes, tabloids on her desk, a wizard in her office telling her how much he loved her ex-fiancee). Her hair was pinned loosely up, hanging half in her eyes; not dressed down, but not presenting herself in any extraordinary way. Casual CEO, Miss Potts.

“Tony?” she called out once, almost off-handedly. With a swift movement, she ducked down to check under the nearest desk. And it loosened a laugh out of Stephen’s frozen chest. She’d been with him for ten years; it must have been a favorite hiding place.

Pepper stood to her full height again, and with a little sigh, she tipped her chin up—not quite looking at the ceiling.

“FRIDAY, is Tony here?” she asked.

“Sorry, Miss Potts,” the AI answered, “but he’s asked me not to tell anyone.”

Pepper sighed again, but there was a familiar smile pulling at one corner of her mouth. “Why does he always disappear when I need a signature?”

Even across dimensions, Stephen found a similar smile working its way across his own mouth. He stood, almost directly in front of her by way of chance, and smiled. 

Her head turned just in time to see Steve Rogers enter the lab for the second time that day. And he didn’t look nearly as calm and well-put-together as she did—if Stephen didn’t know better, he’d say that Captain America looked practically frazzled.

“Steve,” Pepper said with a little note of concern in her voice. She stood just slightly taller, hugging the clipboard close to hide whatever was on the papers there.

He seemed just as surprised to see her there as she was to see him. “Pepper. Hi.” He sucked in an awkward breath, and took a quick look around the lab as she had done. “You didn’t—you haven’t seen Tony have you?”

“Parker was here, too,” Wilson said from his position in the doorway.

“Great,” Steve sighed, his hands in his pockets. “Now we’ve got four missing Avengers and nothing to tell us where they went.”

Pepper’s face contracted in confusion. “Tony’s missing? And Peter—?”

“And Strange and Wanda,” Wilson provided. “You think the magic man made ‘em disappear?” he added with a little sardonic smirk.

“No,” Steve waved the question away with growing frustration. “I just…”

Pepper held out a hand to halt their speech. “Okay, Steve, calm down and start again.”

“I’d love to,” Steve said with a groan, “but things are starting to look a little grim around here. I’m just about as filled-in on anything going on as you are.”

“Strange said it pretty clear, I think,” Wilson said, shaking his head. “House divided.”

Stephen’s eyebrows shot up, glancing sideways at Wilson. He hadn’t even known if his message had got across to anyone, let alone the Falcon.

“I don’t know, was he working on anything new?” Steve asked, taking a look around the lab.

Pepper shrugged. “I don’t keep track any more.”

“Okay…” Steve murmured, head down as his eyes moved rapidly in thought, planning a course of action. “FRIDAY,” he spoke out loud, arms crossed worriedly across his chest. “Please bring up the last thing Tony was working on.”

“I’m sorry to say that only three people are authorized to access that information, Captain Rogers,” FRIDAY answered. “The boss, Pepper Potts, and Bruce Banner.”

Steve palmed his face, sighing heavily to himself. 

“Pepper, could you…?” Steve asked, barely lifting his head.

Her back stiffened, all defenses engaged and somehow suddenly seeming taller than a supersoldier. And Stephen felt a proud little arrow strike somewhere in his middle, unwarranted warmth and affection pouring out of the wound.

“I don’t work for you, Captain,” Pepper said succinctly, her tone clipped.

“No—” Steve tried to defend himself. “Pepper, Tony’s been on edge since Strange…” He paused, as if calculating where this conversation would bring them. Steve’s shoulders dropped, and he looked much more vulnerable and much smaller than he actually was. “Stephen walked out this morning, and Tony—I’m worried about him, worried something’s happening.”

“ _Now_ you’re worried,” Stephen muttered under his breath, quiet despite knowing no one could see or hear him.

He watched the complicated series of emotions working through Pepper’s face—some of which (barely-contained indignation, heavy concern) were very easily identifiable, and some so muddled he could barely register them on her face. All half-hidden under a strong veneer of offended stoicism.

“FRIDAY,” Pepper said with a short breath, “can you please bring up the last project Tony was working on?”

“Absolutely, Miss Potts,” FRIDAY answered.

Stephen tensed, held his breath.

A handful of holographic interfaces popped up around them, shedding myriad light across their faces. All of them projecting the same message.

And Stephen broke into loud, pretty, embarrassed laughter, holding a hand to his blushing face—feeling the need to hide even in the Mirror Dimension.

Surprise birthday party plans for Stephen Strange, complete with schematics of the Compound, a long and detailed list of preparations, phone numbers for caterers and florists—and an accompanying candid picture of Stephen (in one of Tony’s T-shirts and not much else, mug of tea steaming and held in both of his hands, morning light shining in his eyes and a quiet, intimate smile on his face), tacked on as if to remind Tony who the party was for. Stephen stood right at Pepper’s shoulder, looking down—beaming—at the lavish plans he wasn’t supposed to know about.

He didn’t know how he’d done it—some kind of trapdoor program, maybe, in order to keep his real work a secret from everyone but himself—but Tony had managed to cover their tracks. And managed to make Captain America go pink in the face, to boot.

A little smirk hovered on Pepper’s mouth—a little smug, but she’d earned it—and she held on hand firm on her hip as she turned back to Steve.

“Satisfied?” she asked, waving once at the multiple birthday plans around them.

“Not really,” Steve answered, sighing deeply. “Please tell us if you find out anything. We’re just—”

“Worried,” Pepper supplied flatly. “I’ll keep an eye out for your lost Avengers, Captain,” she added, and it sounded _very_ final. 

And a little appreciative smirk popped onto Steve’s mouth. He nodded, smart enough to know when tactics had failed, and when to pick a different strategy. Stephen barely knew the man, and even he could sense that.

A minute later, and Pepper was alone in the lab once more (aside from the man trapped in the Mirror Dimension beside her), and she let out a long, frustrated sigh.

“Okay, FRIDAY, they’re gone,” she said aloud. “Can you show me what Tony was _really_ working on?”

Without even an affirmation, the displays of birthday plans faded away, replaced by the readouts Tony and Peter had been working on before they’d taken off. The blinking light in Wakanda, the frequencies they’d been scanning, information on the wavelength output by the mind stone. 

Pepper sighed, her entire frame sagging as her eyes searched the information. “Oh, Tony,” she grumbled.

She deserved to know. Of anyone, of _all of them_ , Pepper deserved to know that Tony was okay, despite getting himself thrown headfirst into a problem that wasn’t his to deal with in the first place. Even if she _hadn’t_ been his friend, she was still the CEO of his company.

Stephen took a breath, and through that breath, pushed himself out into the real world once more.

“Miss Potts, please don’t be alarmed,” he said as he materialized behind her.

Rather, he got through the first three syllables before Pepper rounded on him with a tight gasp—almost a scream—and lobbed her clipboard straight through him.

Stephen’s mouth hung half-open, staring hard down at his chest where the clipboard had phased straight through his projection, and almost laughed. Almost lost control and almost broke down into crazed, manic giggling. But he didn’t. He regained composure and looked back up at her with a single eyebrow quirked up high on his forehead.

“Oh my god,” Pepper vocalized finally, her hands halfway to her mouth, looking at him with saucer eyes. “Stephen? Is that—” She glanced once at the projected readouts all around them, then back to him. “Are you a hologram? Is this a program?”

He tilted his head, gave a slight shrug (not a bad guess, closer than Peter thinking he was a ghost) before answering. “I’m projecting my astral body from the Mirror Dimension.” He, too, was left with his mouth open for just a moment, realizing that it might not have been a very good answer. “Tony’s fine for now, I promise. But it’s… complicated.”

Pepper stared for a long time. Blinking, looking him up and down, glancing at the readouts. Thinking.

“I’ve had complicated,” she said at last. Her stance settled, just slightly. “Try me.”

Despite the complications over the last twelve hours, despite being trapped, despite the looming threat of the stones loose in the world again—despite everything, Stephen felt an appreciative smirk crawling across his face.

+++

Peter sighed heavily, sinking lower into his seat, and shook his head almost in disapproval. “How d’you guys keep doing this?” he asked with a languid sigh. “You and Mister Strange, I mean. First it was time stuff, now it’s dimension stuff.”

“Yeah, well, when I started dating a wizard, I kinda figured _normal_ was off the table,” Tony elucidated, and he propped his feet up on the console in front of him. 

Peter jumped, hands ready to grab the steering column. “Hey! Aren’t you flying?” he asked in a reedy voice.

“Oh, hell no,” Tony said, waving a hand at the sky. “I never drive myself anywhere as a rule. Autopilot. I just like looking important in the front seat.”

Peter rolled his eyes and flopped back down into his seat. “So. Do you think Wanda’s dangerous?”

Tony frowned, scratching the hair at the back of his neck in thought. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “She… she trapped Stephen and stole the stones. That’s what I’m going on right now.”

Peter tapped his fingertips together in the ensuing silence, and there was a sadness tinging his voice when he spoke again. “We’re not going to have to fight her, are we?”

And Tony didn’t have an answer for that. His silence said more than any unsure waffling would have, and Peter’s mouth pulled down into a frown that didn’t fit his boyish face. Tony looked over his shoulder, caught Peter in a glance. He’d fought Wanda in Germany—and while there hadn’t been any pulled punches, they hadn’t been trying to literally kill each other. He hoped (god how he hoped) that it wouldn’t come to that this time. But he had to be ready. Had to be ready to get Peter out of there if it went that far south.

“Uh, Mister Stark?” Peter said, breaking Tony from his reverie, his voice suddenly wary.

Tony turned in the seat—not quite enough to take his eyes off the sky. “What? What’s wrong?”

“It’s, um… Aunt May is calling me.”

He held up his phone, showing the contact info with May’s grinning face, giving herself bunny ears. Buzzing loudly, unanswered.

“I—I should answer it, right?” Peter asked almost too quickly, finger hovering over the phone. “I mean, ‘cause if I ignore it she’ll know something’s wrong and she’ll keep calling—”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Tony said just as quickly, denial heavy in his tone. “You’re an Avenger, this is Avengers stuff. It’s not—” 

And Peter answered the call, despite Tony’s sudden movements to halt movement, hard finger to his lips, and finally a hand smacked to his forehead.

“Hey—hey May,” Peter said cheerfully, his face bent apologetically at Tony. “Yeah, um, everything’s cool.” He bit his lip, listening with a growing apprehension and a clear contraction into himself. “I know, but—”

“Screw it,” Tony said under his breath, and with a few presses on the console in front of him, Tony sent the call to the speakers of the Quinjet. “May, hi, it’s Tony,” he said out loud.

The line was silent for a complete total of two seconds.

“Stark,” Tony said, brows furrowing with a glance at Peter. “Tony Stark.”

“I know which Tony it is,” May’s voice cut in, thin and angry. “I’m _trying_ to figure out why you’re answering Peter’s phone. And it’d _better_ not be space again, Mister Stark, because—”

“It’s not—” Tony tried to defend himself (absolutely ignoring the look of Peter trying his very best to stifle his laughter in the corner of his eye). “We’re not in space, May, we’re—I’m taking him on—” He waved a hard hand at Peter, shooing him and his giggling to the back of the Quinjet. “The Avengers are on a diplomatic mission to Wakanda, and I thought it’d be a good opportunity for Pete—”

“Peter!” May gasped. “Africa! Without telling me—”

“It’s not dangerous, I swear,” Peter interrupted, leaning over the back of Tony’s seat. “It’s not a—a mission, it’s totally safe, right Mister Stark?”

“Totally,” Tony answered, nodding even without needing to. “Don’t even need to go through airport security. I’ll have him back for dinner—whatever you guys want, my treat.”

“You wanted to try that Thai place a few blocks up,” Peter added quickly.

“Great!” Tony tacked on, thumping an enthusiastic fist on the console for effect. “Pete’ll tell you all about it over some pad thai. Maybe we’ll pick you up a snowglobe or—”

“Stark!” May cut back in, not to be spoken over. An angry pause followed, filled by Peter and Tony meeting worried glances. “The next time you decide to take my nephew on a diplomatic mission—to anywhere, to _Brooklyn_ —you _call me_. Peter, you’re one hundred percent grounded when you get back. I want updates, mister.”

“Would I have reception in Wakanda?” Peter asked quietly.

“We will, May,” Tony said over him. “Promise.”

He let her hang up first—he didn’t want her thinking they were dodging her more than usual by ending the call too quickly. How could Tony launch himself into the stratosphere without his heart skipping a beat, but trying to negotiate his way through a conversation with an angry aunt was _daunting_?

“Oh man,” Peter groaned, rubbing both hands over his face. 

“How many times can she ground you?” Tony asked through a puzzled grin. “Is this like, triple grounded, now?”

“I’m glad _you_ think it’s funny,” Peter sniped. “Being an Avenger is seriously killing my social life.”

“Well, buck up, kiddo, because you’re about to meet royalty.” Tony punched up an interface, a list of numbers and their contact information, scrolling until he found the one he wanted (listed simply as _Cat Man_ ).

“Stark?” came the urgent voice of the King of Wakanda over the Quinjet speakers (Peter tried to hide the way his eyes were shining).

“T’Challa,” Tony answered as calmly as possible. “Hey, I’ve got a missing person case you might be able to help me with.”

+++

Pepper had taken a seat, listening carefully and silently as Stephen spilled the proverbial beans. Everything from Wanda approaching him to his fight with Tony (a knowing light coming into her eyes), to getting trapped and finding the stone’s signature in Wakanda. She sat through all of it, and through Stephen was beginning to feel the strain of projecting himself again, he powered through for her sake.

“All I can ask is that you don’t let the other Avengers know—not yet,” Stephen added at the end. “I have no power to stop you, but…”

“You’re betting that I won’t, anyway,” Pepper finished. She held her hands carefully in her lap, watching them instead of his projection. “This is dangerous, Stephen.”

“We’ve had worse,” Stephen said, a breathy laugh tumbling out of him.

She passed a weary hand over her face, hiding there for a long moment. “This is _exactly_ why we broke up,” she grumbled into her palm. 

Stephen interjected only with a sharp breath, words unsaid, a hesitance even in his astral body.

She smirked at him. “Don’t give yourself too much credit.” She sighed, looked across the lab almost fondly. “It was like this for years before he met you. It was too much. Always disappearing, always running into another fire, another crisis. I know that he felt like he had to, that Iron Man owed something to the world, but I couldn’t worry myself into the ground over him. Not for the rest of our lives.”

A little smile played at the corners of her mouth. Something fond, something sad.

“I’m glad he has someone, Stephen,” she said at last. “Maybe not someone to keep him out of trouble—I tried that, god knows it didn’t work. But to have his back.”

She looked up, puzzling just a moment longer, before opening her mouth again.

“Why trust me and not Steve?” she asked, finally digging to the crux of the predicament.

Stephen dropped his eyes for just a moment, just long enough for a hint of weakness to show through his practiced stoicism.

“Because you love him as much as I do.”

And neither of them denied it. Rather, their eyes met—maybe for the first time in complete honesty, finally open with one another—and there was a recognition there that neither could deny. Maybe a sadness, maybe a vulnerability, but it was theirs together. She smiled first, and he followed just after.

“How did you know, by the way?” he asked. “That FRIDAY wasn’t showing everyone the truth?”

A wide smile grew slowly on her face. “They’re the same fake birthday plans he used to use for me. Your picture’s nicer, though.”

Stephen laughed, rolled his eyes. “Oh, Tony,” he found himself sighing.

Pepper stood, adjusted her skirt, and crossed her arms as their eyes met again. “Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.

“There’s no need to get more involved than you already are, Miss—”

She held up a hand to cut him off very quickly. “Pepper,” she told him. “He stresses me out, _you’re_ stressing me out. But he’s still my friend, Stephen.”

Stephen smiled kindly, even through the effort of keeping himself visible in the real world. She really was something else. Smart, kind, loyal. How was _he_ any competition? How had Stephen Strange, some obscure sorcerer with a handful of dollars to his name and a piss-poor attitude, managed to beat her out and come away with Tony Stark’s heart?

He managed to tame his growing smile long enough to suggest: “Keep Captain America off his trail?”

A little smirk ticked up on Pepper’s lips. “I can certainly try.”


	12. the princess

Peter missed whatever greeting Tony and T’Challa exchanged on the landing pad, as his attention was focused rather on the incredible cityscape of Wakanda around them—the glow of the protective shield around the city, the gorgeous architecture, the color and the sound so unlike anything New York City had ever seen.

“Hey!” Tony finally said, breaking through the reverie of wonder on Peter’s face, and the noise pulled the teenager like a string to face the two of them with a gaping look still stuck on his young face. “Pete, you gonna introduce yourself to the king?”

“Uh,” Peter began, suddenly seizing up. “Holy cow, um…”

“Peter Parker,” Tony sighed, making a wide flurry of a gesture at his accompaniment. He swung his arms back around to point at T’Challa. “King T’Challa of Wakanda.”

“We’ve met,” King T’Challa said with a small smile, but he extended a hand to Peter nonetheless. “When we were called back from inside the soul stone, we exchanged words, Mister Parker. Before most of us were left behind while Stark and his friends disappeared to eradicate Thanos, that is.”

“That’s, uh… better than me. I got sent home,” Peter said, tentatively taking T’Challa’s hand and shaking (his big eyes full of stars he was trying very fervently to keep in check). 

The King of Wakanda shook firmly, a confused smile fitting onto his face. “But you are not here for a goodwill mission from the Avengers,” he said. “Or a field trip. Stark, you said that one of your friends is missing?”

“Right,” Tony said, clapping his hands together. “You remember Wanda Maximoff?”

“Of course,” T’Challa answered, crossed his arms. “She certainly makes an impression. Do you think she has reason to come to Wakanda?”

“Yeah,” Tony exhaled the words with a weariness that sank to his bones. “A couple big, dangerous reasons.”

T’Challa’s breath left his frame, but no words with them. He thought in a long silence (almost too long, by the way Tony had begun to bounce just slightly on his toes), easily pondering out exactly what Tony meant.

“Are you trying to tell me,” T’Challa began slowly, “that the Infinity Stones that so many lost their lives for have been stolen, and are currently in the hands of Miss Maximoff?”

“Kinda sounds even worse when you say it,” Tony winced. “She’s here, T’Challa, and I think I know what she’s planning—”

“Your friend Vision,” T’Challa cut him off with a very small wave of his hand. “She thinks that my sister can help extricate his consciousness from the stone.”

“Uh,” Tony began, his diatribe dying on his tongue. “Yeah. Exactly.”

“Shuri _was_ working on a complete backup of Vision’s neural network,” T’Challa explained, and he motioned for both of them to follow. Tony immediately fell in step beside the monarch, and Peter hung just a few steps behind. They moved through the double doors from the landing pad into what must have been the palace. “Before her work was interrupted by the battle. Much of the data was compromised, but…” He gave a fond little smile. “Maybe it’s best I let her explain.”

“You can let her explain all she wants,” Tony swerved back in urgently, moving his hands maybe slightly too much to get his point across, “but I think we need to talk about whether or not anyone in the country’s seen a rogue Avenger waving a big metal glove around.”

“I’ve had no such reports,” T’Challa said calmly. “Neither have I nor any of my guard seen any intruders personally.”

“I think you can _lead_ with that next time,” Tony grumbled, and followed beside T’Challa in tense silence.

Only a minute of walking later, the two visitors were escorted into Princess Shuri’s laboratory—shining white, more streamlined and minimalist than Tony had expected. There were at least three levels of R&D that he could see, probably more descending the stairs, and a handful of technicians moving in between myriad experiments and complicated tech.

Tony looked like a kid in a candy shop, and the look on Peter’s face over his shoulder was evolving into much the same.

“The princess is working on all this?” Peter asked (practically vibrating with the eagerness to pounce into the fray and start digging in). Not disbelief in his tone, but admiration (awe).

“The princess has a name!” came a voice from behind them, and it was all they could do to move out of her way as barreled through the lab and skidded to a halt before her brother. She hopped out of whatever mechanism she’d clipped to her shoes, smirking energetically. “Tony Stark?” She laughed, held out a hand with a full-faced grin. “Well, it’s good to finally meet the competition.”

Tony opened his mouth, let her grab his hand and shake firmly. “Is she up for adoption?” he asked, pointing at her with a sideways glance at T’Challa.

“I’m Peter,” the teenager said, hopping into the conversation over Tony’s shoulder. “Peter Parker, hi, I had a question about your shoes—?”

“You like them?” she asked brightly, waved at the now-empty mechanism on the ground between them—metallic skeletons that clipped onto Shuri’s shoes as she stepped back in. “Frictionless foot travel, still in early stages. I’ve been—”

“Shuri,” T’Challa interrupted with a little smirk. “Mister Stark and Mister Parker are here for a different project of yours. Something a little closer to home?”

She looked quickly from Peter to Tony, then back again with a knowing nod. “Oh. Follow me, then, boys.” With barely any effort, she moved off the spot, appearing to skate across the floor and away down a ramp toward a lower level. Peter launched after her, barely able to keep up. 

As the older men followed at a more reasonable pace, T’Challa leaned in almost conspiratorially.

“We have extremely reliable defensive systems here in Wakanda, Stark,” he said, voice low but not angry. “We would have noticed one of your Quinjets attempting to land without clearance.”

“She didn’t bring a Quinjet,” Tony countered in an equally low voice. “She—it’s complicated—you guys don’t have portal tech yet, do you?”

T’Challa scoffed. “No. And we haven’t perfected teleportation just yet.” At Tony’s mystified look, he added: “I’m joking with you, Stark.”

Tony ham-handedly shook off the veneer of childlike wonder, clearing his throat. “Well, you were there when Stephen—er, when Strange brought me back from dying, right?”

“Right,” T’Challa said heavily, like they had stepped back into a conversation that neither was glad to be having. “ _Magic_. You’ll forgive me if I’m not inclined to believe—”

“Believe it or not,” Tony cut him right off, “that’s how she got here. Probably snuck in right under your radar.” He pulled the phone out of his pocket, flicked it a few times until the readout of their scanners was showing. “I know this is kids stuff compared to your tech, but—” he admitted, holding the display up to show T’Challa the readout, and suddenly balked—his stream of words coming to a hard, sputtering halt.

Any indication of the stones’ location was gone. The program was searching, but the blinking light that had led them to Wakanda in the first place was gone. His map was blank.

“Okay, this looks…” Tony started, but found nothing pithy enough to fill the silence. “This was blinking right on Wakanda an hour ago, Pete was there, he can vouch—” His eyes darted from the display to T’Challa’s face (unmoved, but not quite to anger). “It’s obvious this is where she’d bring it, she’s just—she’s here— _the gauntlet_ is here.”

T’Challa sighed, but even his nearly-unreadable face pinched in concern. “We can feed your algorithm into Shuri’s machines. Perhaps our shields are interfering with your program.”

“Doubt it,” Tony grieved, shaking the phone as if somehow that would help.

The two of them finally caught up to Shuri and Peter, who had ducked together over a flat holographic display that hovered over a huge control panel, where Shuri was currently typing something with a smirk hovering on her face.

“Your friend Vision,” Shuri said, turning just slightly to catch Tony in her eye, “his original AI was partially based on a program named JARVIS, right?”

“Uh, not really based on, more like… tacked onto,” Tony answered for her, taking a gaping look at yet another level of her lab. “But kinda, yeah.”

“Was he your _butler_?” Shuri asked with a laugh, scrolling through a jumbled list of protocols and lines of code. 

“Wait, is that him?” Tony asked suddenly, pressing forward until he was the one peering over Peter’s shoulder. The code flashed in his eyes as it scrolled by at unreadable speed.

“Some of him,” Shuri answered, and she leaned casually on the computer casing, waving a hand as she began her explanation. “What I was able to save before the aliens you were supposed to keep at bay invaded my lab, brother.”

“You survived,” T’Challa chuckled.

“I have mostly unrelated fragments,” Shuri pressed through her brother’s jabs, and she tapped the screen once to stop its frantic movement. “Nothing complete enough to restore a full personality.”

“Could you do it if you had the stone?” Tony asked suddenly, didn’t even seem to realize that he’d interrupted. At the miffed look from Shuri, he backed down a step. “Sorry. I mean. Do you think there’s enough stuff Vision left behind in the mind stone to fill in the gaps?”

“Impossible to tell,” Shuri replied. “I barely had enough time with the stone to access the pieces of it that interacted with Vision’s mind, let alone study its deeper functions. If I’d had access to the stone after your war instead of having them locked away, maybe I could tell you more.”

“Yeah, well, that might just be a possibility,” Tony sighed, and he held the phone out to Shuri.

“Adorable,” she murmured under her breath, and took the phone between thumb and forefinger. “Oh, is this tracking program sweeping for the frequency of gamma energy given off by the stone?”

Peter broke into laughter, grinning ear-to-actual-ear as he watched her spin away and work. “Mister Stark, can I officially drop out of your internship?”

“You know that was just an unofficial cover story, right?”

“Can I unofficially drop out, then?”

“Excuse me for interrupting,” Shuri said, not sounding very sorry at all, “but did you lose _all_ of the Infinity Stones, or just one?”

“Shuri,” T’Challa sighed, and his brotherly tone was enough to tame her snideness to little more than a proud smirk. “The gauntlet was taken from the Avengers Compound, and Stark believes that it may have been brought here.”

“I think that we would know if all six stones were in Wakanda,” Shuri remarked, but linked Tony’s phone into her array regardless. 

“The tracker’s not working?” Peter asked, his face pulled into a jumble of confusion. “How’s that possible? I mean, there’d be some kind of reading, even if she wasn’t _here_ , right?”

“Right,” Tony confirmed, crossing his arms. “So unless the stones are literally out of this world, there should be _something_ blinking on that little screen.”

“If she is using the stones, they very well may be,” T’Challa added. 

“She wouldn’t take the gauntlet anywhere else,” Tony snapped, straightening his back in an attempt to look taller, take up more room. “The girl lost the love of her life, and your little sister’s got one of the keys to maybe getting him back.”

“Uh, Mister Stark?” Peter attempted to say.

“As much as you seem to think we are, I am not trying to belittle your efforts, Stark,” T’Challa spoke over the small sound of Peter’s voice.

“Mister Stark?” Peter tried again, trying to ignore the knowing smirk curling at the edges of Shuri’s mouth.

“I know you think I’m nuts,” Tony protested, took one step closer to reel his argument in. “But that tracking program _isn’t_. Those stones—”

“Mister Stark!” Peter said loudly and much too quick, finally managing to interrupt the adults. And once he had their attention—both Tony and T’Challa turning with a strange look in their eyes—he immediately clammed up and faltered. “I—I—Well, I was just thinking about what Mister Strange said, about that place where you can’t be seen or heard by anyone in the real world—”

“Real world…?” T’Challa began with a confused twist of his brow.

But in turn, he was interrupted by Tony, who snapped his fingers and pointed harshly at Peter with a proud look dawning all over his animated face.

“Mirror Dimension,” Tony said through a dawning grin. “Good thinking, kiddo. Hell, she could be in the room _right now_.”

T’Challa and Shuri locked eyes, with almost identical furrowed brows. But Tony had tuned them out completely, fixing his fingers into an arcane configuration. Slammed them forward once to no effect.

“Shit,” he murmured, planting his arms in another position—shut his eyes to block outside stimuli and kickstart his memory. “What was the gesture? God, he makes it look so easy…”

“Stark?” Shuri asked through a thinly-veiled laugh before she turned to Peter. “What is he trying to do?”

“Um,” Peter began, flummoxed by the idea of explaining magic to someone who had never seen it. “Well…”

“No, no, no, wait,” Tony said, dropped his arms away with a wide and blustering movement, and started to pace. “She’s got Stephen’s ring, and we’ve got _dick_. Even if I blast my way into the Mirror Dimension, she could trap us in there just as easy as she did to him.”

T’Challa opened his mouth for a question, but Tony waved him down with a pleading look.

“Okay, I know how bad this all sounds,” Tony stepped in, looking desperate. “But you got the algorithm hooked into your machines now, and I’ve got nothing else to go on, and we kinda helped save the universe together once so just _trust me_ for a second.”

Tony rubbed a weary hand over his eyes, thinking almost loud enough to hear. 

“Okay. _Okay_ ,” he said aloud into the now-quiet air of the lab. Crossed his arms, shut his eyes tight, and uttered a long, bitter sigh. “Wanda.”

Peter glanced about the room, as if expecting her to pop into existence as Stephen had done at the Compound.

“Wanda,” Tony continued, “I know I’m probably the last person in the galaxy you wanna talk to right now. And I’m way on the other side of pissed off, because you _knocked out_ my boyfriend.” He grit his teeth past the anger, breathed through it and continued. “But I know you’re here somewhere, because we tracked you here. You still got a chance to fix this. Don’t make it worse.”

Thirteen seconds of silence followed, and so Tony kept talking.

“He’s worried about you,” he said, more quietly than before. “You kicked his ass, and he’s still worried about you. I promised him I’d try to see it from your point of view, but you gotta work with me, Wanda. Because I _really_ don’t understand why you decided to steal the stones instead of just—”

Peter jumped out of the way of a sudden burst of sparks in the middle of the room, where a circular portal had appeared—one Tony recognized as being formed by a sling ring, not by the space stone. And out of it walked Wanda Maximoff. Red-eyed from exhaustion, from the tears on her face; tentative, anxious, shaking.

She dropped the hand with Stephen’s sling ring on it to dismiss the portal. But her other hand remained fixed in its position in front of her. The fingers of the gauntlet trembled, stones shining.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry about how late this is, I've had a ridiculously busy week and I also wanted to make extra sure I didn't mess up the Wakanda crew (I guess we'll find out! Still worried!) hope y'all are still enjoying, and thanks so much for sticking with me! I just realized that this is the first chapter in the series with NO Stephen!


	13. standoff

The gap of silence that followed was almost comically long. Like a cinematic standoff without the music, an overlong and overly heavy pause. Wanda’s shaking breath the only sound.

She looked terrible. Putting the gauntlet on her hand had taken its toll on her, added a weight that turned her even paler than usual. Her legs seemed barely able to hold her up, the fingers of her free hand shook. The tracks that her tears had left on her face were still wet, and there was a dull scarlet glow in her eyes.

T’Challa had placed himself in front of Peter and Shuri, both of his hands held in front of him. Tony shifted his weight, just slightly backward—away from the gleaming metal of the gauntlet on Wanda’s hand. Hadn’t even realized he’d conjured a shield, but was staring through the blue, shimmering runes all the same. 

“Hey,” Tony said stupidly.

Wanda swallowed terribly, staring at him, and gave the smallest nod. “Hey,” her weak voice struggled out of her mouth.

“First thing’s first,” Tony cut back in, “let’s get rid of the Power Glove, okay? Just… put it down and we can talk.”

“I can’t,” she hissed. “I brought it this far, Tony, I can’t stop now. You know that.”

“I know how heavy that thing is,” he told her, voice somehow steady. “That accessory from hell nearly killed me, I know exactly what it’s capable of. And I’d like to think after a couple years of working together, I know what _you’re_ capable of. Murder isn’t in your playbook.”

She shook her head violently, hair curtaining around her. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“There’s a wizard back home that’d have something to say about that,” Tony mumbled. “But if that’s true, you should probably drop the gauntlet. Because one misfire from that thing, and it’s possible a few of us are gonna have never existed.”

Her eyes darted once to the stones, then back up to Tony and his shield. She took a bolstering breath and straightened her spine.

“He’s in there,” she said, almost too quietly to hear. “Viz is trapped in there, she can get him out.” At the last, she nodded at Shuri, and T’Challa pressed his sister even further back from Wanda’s stare. “Can’t you?” Wanda pressed even harder, winced at the sound of her own voice.

“Hey, hey,” Tony said, skirting back into her vision by planting himself firmly between Wanda and the others—the arm with shield conjured held out stock straight in front of him, palm flat behind the runes and barely shaking. “This is between you and me, kiddo.”

“I’m not—” she hissed through her teeth. “She can get the stone out, I saw her program. This is the _only way_ I can— _we_ can—have him back.”

“Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you broke in and _stole_ it,” Tony snapped back. “God, Wanda, did you even think about _asking_?”

A cold flash of fear stuttered across her face, and she faltered for a long moment. Long enough for Tony to consider the option of rushing her and just trying to wrangle the gauntlet off in her shock. But she shook it off, like stepping out of a heavy rain.

“We don’t talk,” she sniped. “None of us do. All we do is dance. Avoid each other in the hall and pretend nothing happened, that no one died. I died! Viz is still dead! You wouldn’t have agreed to this, and you know it!”

Tony cut off the angry retort on his own tongue with a hiss, grit his teeth through the effort not to scold her. He tried again, less vitriol this time.

“Look, that thing on your hand is officially the most powerful weapon in the galaxy, probably the universe. Of course I wouldn’t agree to it, I don’t want anyone getting hurt. That includes you.”

Wanda all but snarled, the light in her eyes brightening—two spots of red in her pale, tired face. "Since when do you care what happens to me?"

One of Tony's fingers shot out, a hard accusation that needed no words to back it up (oh, but he was having words). "Since you've been an Avenger!" he cried. "I know you don't like me, Wanda, but that doesn't mean I don't give a shit about you—don't you throw that back on me without proof!" He shook the accusatory gesture out of his hand like it had hurt to hold it there. "And I _know_ the atmosphere at the Compound 's been shitty since Thanos threw us back together kicking and screaming. I _know_ that sometimes we all get along like a bunch of cats in a sack, but don't say I don't care, Wanda!"

The anger in her faltered, just a for a moment, then shoved itself hastily back into her pinched face.

“If it was Stephen,” she pushed through the tears gathering in her throat. “If it was the man that loves you! Wouldn’t you want to do _everything_ you could? Even if you failed? Even if it killed you to try?”

Tony’s harsh breath caught in his throat, just for one second, but it was enough to show that weakness to everyone in the room. That breath drained out of him, and he sagged into something suddenly vulnerable, suddenly wide open and utterly readable. His shield dissipated into sparks, hand dropping to his side, balled into a fist for just a moment. His face fell, throat bobbed. 

“Yeah,” Tony murmured, more quietly than maybe he’d intended, by the way his eyes attempted to find something else to focus on. “I think maybe I would.”

It seemed to take her by surprise, and her intense focus dropped away for just a moment. Her next breath stuttered through her, brows bowing in concern. And Tony took the opportunity to move forward. All it took was two steps until the outstretched fingers of the gauntlet touched the arc reactor, and it was Wanda who shifted back from the connection.

“You’re right,” Tony pressed. “I think I’d probably do just about anything. And I did. He died—I watched him turn to ash. And even if I wasn’t in love with him _then_ , it’s still stuck in my head _now_. I fished his ass out of the soul stone along with a couple trillion other asses and almost got myself _killed_ for it. I know what you want, Wanda, I _get it_.”

He reached out, held the fingers of the gauntlet like he wanted to give her an oversized handshake. Held firm, despite the caged look in her eyes.

“We’re impulsive,” he said for the both of them. “You and me. For better or worse, we rush in. I don’t think I know what ‘self-preservation’ even means.” He ignored the noise of dissent from the peanut gallery behind him (probably Peter) and waded back in. “I had to use the stones, but this isn’t the end of the universe, not this time. You’ve got a _choice_. You know Vision wouldn’t want you to get yourself killed for him.”

Wanda’s breath hitched, but she didn’t pull away. “You weren’t there, Tony,” she forced her words through the tears in her throat. “You didn’t have to stare down the man you love as you _killed him_ with your own hands. Could you do that? Could you live with yourself knowing you did it for _nothing_?”

Tony swallowed past whatever was trying to make its way up his throat. “I don’t know. I hope I never have to know.” And then he laughed. Just one small noise in the back of his throat. “Look at us. Talking.”

Silent tears dropped from her eyes, slid down the pale panes of her face. Her lips twisted into a sad smirk, and she echoed him.

“Take it off,” Tony said again. “Just… drop it, and we can talk ‘til the sun goes down. You know that thing’s not worth it.”

“I…” Her voice caught, and the fingers of the gauntlet reflexively twitched. “I don’t know if I can.”

“You can,” he reassured her. His fingers pulled on the gauntlet, but not insistent. “If I did it, so can you.”

“I’ve ruined it,” she said suddenly, tumbling out of her with a sob. “I’ve ruined everything. He trusted me, Tony. You all trusted me and I’ve—I’ve done something so selfish and—” Her free hand clamped over her mouth, wet eyes locking with his. “Oh God.”

The gauntlet tightened around Tony’s hand, almost too hard for comfort; some light caught in the facets of the stones, glinting maliciously. His face buckled in pain, and he breathed a puff of hard air at the effort to keep himself from outright yelling.

“Mister Stark—” Peter tried to cut in, bolstered by the concern tensing in T’Challa.

“We’re fine,” Tony said loudly to cover Peter’s voice, not breaking his concentration from Wanda’s terrified face. “We’re fine, right, Wanda?”

“I don’t—” Her voice sounded heavy, trapped. “I can’t—”

“Hey,” Tony broke in. He slapped his second hand to the outside of the gauntlet to steady himself, ignored the flash of the stones in the light (like they were crying out to him, trying to reel him back in). Her scared eyes clicked with his over the stones. “Wanda, listen. I know that the Avengers haven’t been the family you needed, especially after Thanos tried to rip the universe a new one. But we’re gonna start again, right here. Yesterday, I was probably the literal last person on Earth you wanted to trust, but today—right now—you gotta trust me. _Let go_.”

She sucked in a stuttering breath, not even fighting the tears anymore. Nodded, blinked more of them down her cheeks (clinging to her chin, catching the light of the stones). Closed her eyes, and finally let go.

+++

The flash of a circle of sparks in his periphery brought Stephen’s head snapping up to attention. On guard, ready with a shield for another attack.

Two figures strode through the portal into the Mirror Dimension. Stephen dropped the shield immediately, moved as quickly as his tired limbs would let him.

Tony stood on the spot, practically vibrating with the need to launch in and grab Stephen—actually, physically hold him; reassure himself that he was real, that they finally existed on the same plane again. And Stephen felt it as powerful as a magnet; the pull, the need. But beyond that, he saw the look in Tony’s eye. Instantly readable, everything on that incredible face.

Relief, first and foremost, and the fatigue that came hand-in-hand with it. Soft affection practically radiating off of him. The release of so much tension that his breath was shaking. But with an infinitesimal nod at the woman beside him, deferring all of Stephen’s attention for the time being.

Wanda was paler than Stephen had ever seen her. Her whole frame shook, and a nauseous apprehension stood stark on her face. Like she’d been gutted, bleeding out; like she was dying. She looked at him like he was going to actually kill her. She wasn’t crying, too scared even for that.

The gauntlet wasn’t on her hand. Tony held it in both of his arms, protective but spiteful.

Stephen came to a slow halt in the space directly in front of Wanda, glowering down at her with a look of wounded stoicism. It turned in his stomach, his face pinched so hard that it hurt.

“How could you?” Stephen said, barely-contained acid in his rough voice. Wanda winced as if he’d physically struck her. The look on Tony’s face flashed into a jumble of confusion, but Stephen pressed through both of their reactions—voice dark and grave. “Wanda, do you have any idea how serious this is? What you could have done? Your selfish actions could have thrown the universe into untold chaos, if those stones had gotten the better of you. You could have killed yourself, killed Tony, destroyed anything that was left of Vision in the mind stone.”

She couldn’t even meet his eye, her gaze pinned hard and unmoving on her own naked, trembling hands (white-knuckled, clutched hard as stone in front of her, twisting and worrying). Her breath was so thin and terse, barely audible. A noise almost like the beginning of a word fluttered out of her, but she yanked hard on the reigns to keep it in her mouth. 

"How _could_ you?" he said again, but this time more even. 

A low sigh rumbled out of Stephen’s chest. Without another word, he bundled Wanda into his arms and pulled her into a soft embrace.

“I’m so disappointed in you,” he said lowly, holding her.

A painful sob wracked out of her as she buried her face in his chest, grabbed him almost too tightly. And she cried. Buckled right into him and fell into muffled sobs.

Stephen’s eyes ticked up to Tony still lingering by the portal, caught him and held him there with his gaze. Shining with affection and barely pulling out a sad smile over the top of Wanda’s head.

“Hi, Tony,” he said, something so simple and somehow so bursting with meaning and emotion.

Tony practically deflated when it hit him, a sappy grin sliding so effortlessly onto his face as the sun rose in his eyes. “Hey, baby.”

Stephen smoothed Wanda’s hair under his shaking fingers, eyes locked on the man he loved. Let out all the tension with one breath, and said: “Let’s go home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a long and heartfelt afterthought written out, but then my internet died and I lost it. BUT! The gist of it was that I hope that the emotional climax has enough punch for the payoff, and I hope that those that are still reading still like it as much as I do. 
> 
> Unless the wrap-up gets away from me, the next chapter will probably be the last of this fic. I have another one in planning stages, already, though! If you're interested, stay tuned! Thanks so much for reading so far!


	14. family

“We don’t have to tell them,” Tony said thoughtfully, glancing again through the half-open doorway and into the main floor lounge of the Compound. 

Stephen had been more than surprised to find that, when he’d requested a meeting, everyone sort of just _agreed_. He’d honestly expected more of a fight, especially from Steve, who had been on tenterhooks since the day the three of them (well, four, including Peter) had disappeared. In fact, Steve was the one to round up any of the stragglers (Clint) and bring them together in confused mingling. Even Peter was there, trying his best to do his homework as the Avengers milled about around him.

So Stephen lowered a hard stare at Tony, half-lidded and barely a degree from burning. “They’re your teammates, and you’re living with them. You don’t think it’s a good idea to let them know that _our_ security on the gauntlet failed?”

Tony held up a halfhearted hand in his defense, nodding. “Okay, okay,” he sighed. “Lead the way, then, I guess.”

So they strode forward together into the shark tank, and Stephen told the Avengers exactly what had happened over the last forty-eight hours. There were many protestations, quite a few questions, but Stephen’s voice allowed for little argument. Everything from Wanda’s theft to retrieving the gauntlet in Wakanda—incidentally, where they had decided to leave it. 

Shuri had a point, Tony admitted to those gathered—with her devoting her time to thoroughly studying the stones, she just _might_ find a way to not only extract Vision from the mind stone, but a way to destroy them all for good. And, barring either of those options, she could at least gain a better understanding of them. Tony could admit to being out of his league, especially compared to a teenager; and while their security on the gauntlet had failed, the technology in the palace, guarding Shuri’s lab, was more impressive than anything Tony had ever seen.

Stephen sighed harshly, his eyes darting from face to familiar face. He couldn’t help it; they were his friends, now. He’d come to know them, come to like them; wished that they could see in each other what he saw in them. The potential for greatness, just an arms length away, if they could reach out. But something was still holding them back. He took a breath, and pressed forward into the attention they had given him—for another purpose this time.

“We have to acknowledge our faults and our mistakes,” Stephen broke back into the silence, and heads snapped up around him. “If we don’t, it festers like an untreated wound, and that decay can crumble with the slightest touch—like a few words from a snarky wizard.” His and Tony’s eyes flicked up to meet, mingle just slightly. “I haven’t been here as long as all of you have, and I haven’t seen what you all have seen. But I _am_ an Avenger, whether you like it or not. And you’re my friends,” he added more candidly. He swallowed the warmth that came from a smile from Steve, a nod from Clint, managed to see himself through it. “A good friend knows when you need a push to see the truth.”

“And what truth is that?” Natasha asked, leaning forward in her chair—not eager, but listening.

“You’ve all been treating each other like shit,” Stephen replied bluntly, and it struck the room like a boulder had rolled through it. But that didn’t stop Stephen’s speech (when had impropriety ever?). “Tony can barely get any of you to speak to him, Rhodey sits by himself at lunch, Bruce locks himself in the lab. Now Wanda…”

And that was the unspoken elephant in the room. Wanda was noticeably absent from the meeting, the only Avenger aside from Lang (back to being a full continent away from the rest of them) not present. Stephen felt Tony’s fingers lace with his own—a solid connection, close and warm and inextricably _together_.

“She’s removed herself from the situation entirely,” Stephen continued after the briefest pause. “She went so far out of her way for help that she came to _me_ , and now she feels that she’s better off at the Sanctum than at the Compound with the rest of you. Whether you know you’ve been doing it or not, those lines you drew in Germany are still in the sand, dividing you. If you truly want to be a team, a _family_ , you need to step up and fix it yourselves.”

There was a general shifting of bodies, of eyelines as they bounced from one person to another; no one saying anything but taking their collective scolding in.

Steve sighed, his whole frame sagging, and took the initiative. “You’re right,” was all he said at first, and he locked knowing eyes with Wilson.

Stephen blinked, eyes wide. Well, he hadn’t expected that.

“Tony,” Steve said, directly addressing the man beside Stephen (and Stephen’s fingers gripped Tony’s tightly, protectively), “when I said that the Avengers were your family more than they’d ever been mine, I never thought that I’d be taking them all away from you.”

Stephen could practically feel the anxious stillness radiating off of Tony through their connection, how tightly Tony clamped their fingers together. But Stephen wasn’t walking away, this time. He held back, as firmly as he could, and he remained stoic and steady by Tony’s side.

“I can say I’m sorry until I’m blue in the face,” Steve continued, “but that’s not gonna change the fact that we fought, that I took most of the team with me when I left. And taking down Thanos together didn’t fix everything, I was stupid for thinking it would.”

“Maybe you were,” Tony said. But he swallowed through it, shook it off. “But yeah, it happened. A lot of things happened. So maybe it’ll make things a hell of a lot easier if we just _talked_ , instead of… of—”

“Pretending?” Natasha supplied knowingly.

“In other words,” Clint said, his usual offhanded tone back in his voice where it belonged, “ _play nice_.”

A smile cracked onto Stephen’s mouth, and he found a shrug leaving him. “It’s a start.”

Stephen sat quietly on the arm of a chair, watching as the Avengers came together to Tony; took hands and shook, held an arm on his shoulder, a careful embrace, quiet words that hadn’t been spoken in too long. It was a tentative peace, a toe in the water. Not quite what they’d had before, but they were talking.

And into the long hours of the night that followed, it was Stephen and Tony that talked. Tony pacing circles in his room, throwing his arms around as if that would help get the words out, and Stephen pouring his proverbial heart out. Every misgiving, every errant thought that had stuck with him over the past months came tumbling out. 

The sky had turned a cold gray outside the window, where vases of flowers still lined the sill and turned to stark black silhouettes against the growing light of the morning. Tony and Stephen, curled together on the bed, neither one quite awake or asleep, sat in well-earned silence. Fingers absently (carefully) tracing scars, leaning into one another, breathing in the silence and the closeness and just _existing_ together. Tony was the first to close his eyes, and Stephen followed not long after.

+++

Stephen looked up at the sound of knocking on the front door of the Sanctum, and one of Wanda’s eyes creaked open from her meditative position on the floor. She rose to her feet when he did, and he laid a careful hand on her shoulder to keep them both in place. But by the way the cloak had popped off of his shoulders and made a beeline for the noise, they didn’t have anything to worry about.

“Who ordered the monsoon?” Tony’s loud voice echoed up the stairs, followed by a surprised “ _woah!_ ” as the cloak presumably found him.

A pretty smirk sat unbidden on Stephen’s mouth, but he turned first to Wanda. Though there was a nervous shift in her stance, she attempted a smile and differed his attention with a nod.

The Iron Man armor had almost bled completely back into the arc reactor by the time Stephen came down the stairs. He was met with the sight of Tony trying to wrangle his way out of the affectionate stranglehold the cloak had around his arms and shoulders. Rain pelted hard at the windows, loud in the otherwise comfortable silence of the Sanctum.

“You should get a leash for this thing,” Tony murmured, throwing bright, giddy glances over the struggling of the cloak (which popped off of Tony the moment Stephen arrived, circling the both of them).

Stephen sucked in a breath, and the noise was quiet—but louder than he thought possible in the silence. It had been a week. A full week since he’d seen Tony, or even exchanged more than a text. A week since they’d talked everything over, gotten everything out in the open; a week since the mutual decision to slow down, sort themselves out.

And the first thing out of Stephen’s mouth was: “Hi.” 

The instant regret slammed onto his face, and he managed to see the laughter blooming out of Tony’s full smile before he buried his face in one of his hands (his own shoulders shaking with pent-up, self-deprecating laughter).

He felt Tony’s fingers pulling at his own, prying them away from his face so that they could look at each other (Tony looking up through the forest of Stephen’s fingers like he was looking at the sun).

“Hi,” Tony answered, bursting with everything they didn’t need to say.

Noise on the staircase behind them brought them hastily out of their own world and back to the reality of the Sanctum. They turned together to find Wanda descending the stairs (catlike, hoping maybe to sneak by). But, caught, she stood back to her full height and attempted a look of normalcy.

“Hi, Tony,” she said. She was in the middle of buttoning up a waterproof coat, barely hiding a little smile.

“Hey, Wanda,” Tony replied, and he found a little laugh leaving his chest. “Oh my god—a witch and a wizard. How _haven’t_ I made an Oz joke yet?”

Both Stephen and Wanda rolled their eyes, almost at the same time.

“I think I’ll be going out, Stephen,” Wanda said, and she wrangled an umbrella from the stand by the door. Her pointed look between the two of them was enough for Stephen to get the idea.

He held her briefly in a close embrace, tried to ignore the wink she gave him. He cleared his throat instead, and muttered “Stay dry,” before she turned and left both of them standing in the empty foyer.

“So how, uh…” Tony began, scratching absently at the space under his right ear. Pointed out the door she’d left through, back to Stephen, made a small motion between the two indicated spaces. “How’s she doing? Here? How’s the… the living situation?”

Stephen’s smile pulled back slowly, reveling in the color Tony’s face was turning. A little line of annoyance took a seat between Tony’s brows, but paired with a glancing, sideways smirk.

“As well as can be hoped, I think.” He took a long breath, glanced to the door where she’d disappeared to. “Better.”

A sigh lowered the tension out of Tony’s shoulders, and his stance loosened into something more approachable. “Good. Better’s definitely good.”

“I think I make a better friend than a teacher,” Stephen mumbled, trying his best not to look Tony too hard in the eye.

“I think you’ve got a pretty good record,” Tony mused, and he sidled a step closer. 

Even in that one step closer, Stephen could practically feel Tony’s presence in a wave over him. A week was too long. A week was _far_ too long, he decided, feeling that wave turn into a shiver that struck somewhere low in his spine and shot unapologetically up to his brain. 

There was no possible way Tony could have missed it. And, judging by the way Tony’s eyes looked him thoroughly over, something similar must have struck him as well.

“Miss me?” Tony asked, a snarky kind of smirk pulling up the corner of his mouth.

Stephen rolled his eyes.

“I missed you,” Tony admitted after a pause (too long, even that three second pause was _too long_ ). “Stephen,” he added—in that tone of voice that Stephen knew _very_ intimately.

The breath that caught in Stephen’s throat said everything.

Tony moved in almost too quickly to register, fit his hand to the back of Stephen’s skull and smashed their lips together. Moved his mouth warmly, possessively; insistent and very needy. Somehow soft despite the insistence, the forward press of his advance.

He pulled back just an inch, just enough to see the dazed look he’d left Stephen with (matching it with something proud for having put it there). 

“Holy shit, I needed that,” Tony murmured (still close enough to steal Stephen’s breath). Passed his tongue over his own lips, eyes darting as he examined Stephen’s face, and gave a happy shrug before he dove eagerly back in for another hard kiss.

And Stephen found himself just letting him. Sank into Tony’s searching touch with a little sigh, opened his mouth and let Tony in. Closed his eyes to lose himself to sensation—breath hitching as Tony’s calloused fingertips found their favorite haunts (the short hair at the base of Stephen’s neck, fingernails scraping for a hold; thumb running a familiar circuit along one of his cheekbones; that spot low on Stephen’s back where Tony urged them even closer together, firm, knowing).

An embarrassing sort of noise managed to find its way out of Stephen’s mouth (something low and rumbling), and he surged forward into Tony’s touch. A week was too long without Tony Stark (and Tony Stark’s mouth, and Tony Stark’s—).

With a flash of sparks, Stephen tossed Tony backwards into a portal, where he landed face-up in Stephen’s sheets with a truncated, surprised little noise. 

The look of shock of being dropped through the portal shone on Tony’s pink face (his eyes blown wide), and it bled just as easily into something eager and absolutely debaucherous.

A cocky smile popped onto Tony’s mouth, and he leaned up on one elbow to look into the portal above him.

“You coming, too, or you just like throwing me around?”

A grin caught on Stephen’s face before he dropped through the portal after Tony.

+++

“Hey, so,” Tony said, hands behind his head and staring seriously up at the ceiling.

When he didn’t immediately elaborate, Stephen sat up out of the sheets and perched himself up on one arm to take up the space of Tony’s wandering gaze and focus it. A languid smile worked onto Tony’s lips, and he took his time to run his fingertips through Stephen’s damp bangs.

“So?” Stephen prompted.

Tony cleared his throat. “So, I was thinking. You popping over to the Compound, me having to put on the suit just to fly over and see you, it’s all…” He waved a hand around his head, as if that would help. “... needlessly complicated.”

The smirk on Stephen’s mouth parted, but he didn’t say anything. Tony rolled his eyes, passed his hand over his face and let it flop uselessly to the pillow by his head.

“You’re gonna make me say it.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Stephen said drolly, knew exactly what he meant.

“D’you wanna move in at the Compound?” Tony asked in a hard exhale, as if it had taken a huge amount of effort. “With me? Move in with me?”

The smile faded off of Stephen’s face, and even if it had been the smallest movement, Tony was close enough to see everything. Tony’s expressive face dropped to match, and he held up a hand almost like a shield.

“Was that… Am I rushing again?”

A short breath, and Stephen replied. “You know that I can’t leave the Sanctum unprotected.”

“Right…” Tony was so easy to read, so open (especially when he was still wrapped up in Stephen’s sheets, still flushed in the cheeks), stumbling over his heavy words. “Right, stupid, sorry—”

Stephen pressed a finger to Tony’s lips, stopped his words, smiling down at him. Couldn’t stop grinning at this impossible man.

“So, when will you be moving in?” Stephen asked.

It took a moment to register, at least on Tony’s face. He blinked up at Stephen a total of six times before a sunny grin snapped onto his mouth like someone had slapped it onto him. He pulled Stephen’s hand away so he could speak again, but didn’t let go of those scarred fingers (laced them tighter than a pair of boots).

“Wait, seriously? I’m not a… a sorcerer, is that even _allowed_?”

“Neither is Wanda,” Stephen mused, mussing and then smoothing Tony’s hair thoughtfully. “I think as the Master of this Sanctum, I have every right to ask you to move in with me.” He took a hard breath, looking somewhere else but those brilliant eyes for just a moment. “I know that you’re _Tony Stark_ , and this isn’t quite the living situation you’re accustomed to; there’s no pool, the only visitors I get are usually trying to kill me, it’s filled with artifacts with the power to destroy small countries if they fell into the wrong hands, and—”

“Stephen—” And it was Tony’s turn to clamp his hand over Stephen’s mouth, took the time to grin through a deep-lung laugh. “Shut-up for a second and let me love the fact you just asked _me_ to move into Hogwarts with you.”

Again, Stephen’s eyes rolled hard in his head.

The painfully bright smile on Tony’s face softened as he peeled his hand away, just slightly, and his eyes did a dance all over Stephen’s face. “You’re sure? I mean, it’s… that means this is serious.” His finger waggled to point at both of them in turn. “Us. It means _we’re_ serious.”

Stephen uttered a sharp, dismissive (playful) laugh. “Are you ever serious?”

“I’m completely serious,” Tony charged, eyes shining with barely contained laughter. He gave a little shove at Stephen’s shoulder. “Hey, I asked you first, remember?”

“Is that a ‘yes’ or not?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s a yes. Is there a stronger word than yes? Absolutely. Definitely. Totally.”

Stephen stopped Tony’s mouth with his, and when Tony slid his arms back up around Stephen’s neck, they fell so easily back into one another.

+++

There was a noticeable divot in the bed where Tony had been hours earlier, and as Stephen blinked the sleep from his eyes, he was hit with the irresistible smell of coffee rising from somewhere downstairs. He dug for a shirt, only found Tony’s, and grabbed one with a band logo (something obscure Stephen didn’t recognize, probably a gift from Peter) and paired with loose-fitting slacks. He realized once he’d started down the stairs that he hadn’t even bothered to look in the mirror.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Tony said loudly when Stephen entered the kitchen. He turned to press a hot mug into Stephen’s waiting hands. Stood up on his toes to press a warm kiss to the edge of Stephen’s mouth before whipping back around. “So, I’m not the best cook, and your eggs were seriously out of date, so I ordered out.”

Stephen blinked several times, still trying to wrap his brain around Tony making him coffee. “Okay?” he murmured, and he took a daring sip.

And he realized that Wanda was already seated at the table, a cup of coffee steaming in front of her and a prying little smile sitting on her lips. At least Stephen’s ears had the decency to turn red. She waved at him, and he waved back, and nothing else really needed to be said. Stephen lowered himself into the chair across from Wanda, tapping his fingers against the rim of his mug in the silence.

Wanda’s smirk buckled into a laugh, which turned Tony from pouring himself a cup of coffee like a shot had been fired in the kitchen. And when Stephen’s lips parted to echo her (soft, giddy sort of laughter; quiet in the close quarters of the Sanctum’s small kitchen), Tony leaned his hip to the counter, sagged and sighed (eyes full of Stephen like they were full of stars).

Minutes later, Peter swung into the kitchen, safely cradling take-out boxes that smelled of pancakes and hashbrowns.

“Hey, Mister Stark,” Peter began cheerfully, and he spread the boxes out on the table around them. “And, um, _Doctor_ Strange,” he said pointedly, looking incredibly proud of himself. Stephen laughed, nodded. “Can’t stay too long, I promised May I’d keep the Avengers stuff to emergencies for a little while.”

“This isn’t Avengers stuff,” Tony said, and he grinned when Wong entered the kitchen, two boxes of donuts in his hand. “Just the man I wanted to see! Front and center, Wong, right next to the pile of biscuits. Are those biscuits or hockey pucks?”

“What’s all this?” Wong asked, offering the pastries as asked, an eyebrow quirked in interest.

“Peace offering,” Tony said, snagging a donut to take a hard bite. “Least I can do for my new roomies.”

Peter practically tumbled off his chair, his quick reflexes allowing him to hold on to the edge of the table to keep from tipping over. His wide eyes practically sparkled. “What?!” was all he could manage through his grin.

“Oh yeah,” Tony said, his face split in a grin. “I gotta install a new aperture for FRIDAY, get her familiar with the place, but…”

Stephen found Tony’s speech tuned to background rambling, leaned back in his chair and just took it all in. Tony and Peter seated beside each other, Wong trying his best to scoop some of Tony’s food onto a plate around their conversation. Wanda—

Wanda had barely touched her food, and at first a cold spike of worry shot through Stephen’s chest. But he realized that it wasn’t out of trepidation or even unease. She was just looking around the room as he had been, at the people gathered around the table—Tony now trying to talk through half a mouthful of one of Wong’s donuts, Peter prodding through his phone to show off the series of texts from Shuri, the satisfied smirk on Wong’s face; and finally her eyes landed on Stephen, found him watching her as she watched the others.

A smile grew softly on her face. A quiet, happy smile that looked like she hadn’t shown it in months. She blinked too many times, looked away to hide the shine of tears, but never dropped that smile.

The unmistakable noise of a crowd interrupted whatever moment they’d all been having. Wong, on edge, looked quickly to Stephen. A threat? Someone attempting to attack the Sanctum?

“Uh, guys,” Peter said, on his feet and peering through the nearest window. “There’s a bunch of reporters or something outside.”

“Ah, shit,” Tony sighed, rubbing at his eyes. “Pete, did they follow you?”

“Me?” Peter interjected, offended. “No, no I didn’t even have the suit on. Maybe they followed _you_!”

Stephen waved a hand, standing. “It’s fine,” he said evenly, and he stood from the table, excused himself, and made his way to the front door of the Sanctum. The cloak circled him, snapped onto his shoulders.

“Stephen!” Tony called, and caught up with the sorcerer just in the doorway. “Hey, you don’t have to deal with these assholes yourself.” A silly grin snapped onto his face. “I thought I told you this is serious.”

A long breath stalled in Stephen’s throat. How, in all the possible timelines that had stretched out before him, had he been so _lucky_? How had he managed to have _everything_? He took Tony’s face gently in both of his hands, held him still while he pressed a kiss to Tony’s brow.

“I love you,” Stephen said, smirking down at him.

“Love you, too, sweetheart,” Tony replied, clapped his hand together with Stephen’s, and opened the door.

Waiting outside on his doorstep was a gaggle of onlookers—a few of them snapping pictures, at least one of them with a handheld recorder. They pressed closer as Tony appeared, a flurry of questions swarming out of them.

“Okay, guys,” Tony announced, hands out like he was conducting an orchestra, attempting to quiet the rabble. “It’s stupid early, so we’re gonna make this quick. Beige sweater, go.” He pointed to a woman in the front of the group, singled out by her unassuming outerwear.

“Mister Stark,” beige sweater began. “There are rumors flying about an unsanctioned mission to Wakanda. Can you comment on that?”

“Nope. Undercut guy, your turn.” Tony pointed to another figure in the crowd.

“Uh,” the man with the undercut stumbled. “Is it true that there’s been another falling out with the Avengers and you’ve moved out of the Compound?”

“I only give out my address to terrorists,” Tony answered dismissively. “Any real questions? You—” He pointed to a mousy young man at the edge of the crowd, whose face popped away from his phone in the shock of being singled out. “Hey, Buzzfeed, you got a question?”

“Um—” The would-be reporter began strongly. “Mister Strange—”

“That’s _Doctor_ Strange,” Tony cut him off sharply. He motioned to the man’s phone. “Write that down. And write down that I corrected you.”

He winked sideways at Stephen, who did his best not to blush in front of the press. And, he realized, as the man who may or may not have actually worked for Buzzfeed continued to ask whatever question he’d begun, Stephen wasn’t afraid anymore. Not of the prying questions, the snide remarks, the tacky candid photos from when he’d gone to the good bagel place down the street. There was nothing that they could publish that could hurt him, not with that strong, protective (loving) look that Tony fixed him with. Not with Wanda, and Peter, and Wong behind him.

Stephen winked right back at Tony, the music of camera shutters going off around them.

This was going to work. It was all going to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL it appears this chapter did get away from me (I think it might be longer than the chapter where they fought Thanos, holy crap). But rather than drag it out and try to find a good place for a chapter break, I'm just throwing all the ironstrange at ya. This is the final chapter of this installment, but keep your eyes peeled... there's more to come in this series!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading with me, it's a joy to write these characters and I'm so glad that it brings something to other people as well. It means so much to have y'all along for the ride with me, and I absolutely love hearing from you. I may write because I love these boys, but I also write because I love all of you.
> 
> btw, updates on any future installments can definitely be found at my tumblr, shoelessone


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